Nominal Group Technique
The Disability Policy Research Group uses many different research methods to learn about the experiences of people with disabilities in Canada. Here we provide an overview of the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) process that our team uses in our research studies.
Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a structured, small-group brainstorming session to build consensus in a democratic manner. During this discussion, a facilitator will ask participants to respond to a key question, and ideas from participants will by prioritized by the group. The benefits of using NGT is that each member of the discussion has an equivalent voice and each member is able to equally contribute to group discussions. This discourages domination of the discussion by one or a small number of individuals, which allows for a rich discussion.
There are five steps in the NGT process:
1. Silent Generation: The facilitator presents the key question(s) and participants are asked to write down, individually, their ideas, as many they want, in silence.
2. Round Robin: Participants are asked, in turn, to share their ideas which are recorded. Participants are not allowed to discuss, ask questions, or comments at this step. They are instructed to contribute only ideas that have not been mentioned by other participants or add a different perspective to what has already been mentioned.
3. Clarification: Participants discuss, clarify, and elaborate on collected ideas and determine their relative importance.
4. Categorizing: The facilitator, with the help of participants, will organize the list of collected ideas into thematic categories by placing similar ones in a category. These themes/categories will be recorded by the facilitator, and are discussed and approved by participants.
5. Ranking: Each participant is asked to individually and anonymously prioritize the five most important themes generated in the previous step and to rank order them in terms of importance. For each of the five selected themes each participant should choose between one and five points (their first preference five points and their fifth preference one point). The facilitator will combine all scores to establish a collective ranking