Using multiple ranked lists to achieve a single rank

Question

I have a feeling this may yield a simple answer, but as I am not very mathematically inclined, I'm afraid I am uncertain how to approach this.

I have 4 different ranked questions as follows:

1. What is the first area of importance for Company X to focus on?
2. What is the second area of importance for Company X to focus on?
3. What is the third area of importance for Company X to focus on?
4. What is the fourth area of importance for Company X to focus on?

Each question has the same 11 options in which to rank.

How can I combine these in order to see results which would appear as though there was one single question which asked for the person to rank their choices in order of importance from 1 to 11?

Answer 1

The short answer is that you can't. Your four questions give you four pieces of information: the top four of eleven options.

one single question which asked for the person to rank their choices in order of importance from 1 to 11

would have eleven pieces of information: the ranking for each of eleven options. The issue is that there's no meaningful way to distinguish between the results that were not selected as one of the top four. You have no way of telling which one should be 5th and which is 11th.

However, if all you're interested in is the aggregate results, you could do the following:

1. For each question and each option, assign a ranking to that option (1 if elected as the most important, etc.).
2. If the option wasn't selected, give it a ranking of 8 (the average of ranks 5-11).
3. Compute the average ranking per topic.