Which items in two ranked lists are ranked significantly different?

Question

I have 91 items ranked by different demographic groups of questionnaire participants. The rank lists for each group are all the same length and contain identical items.

I understand that I can perform correlation measures (e.g. Kendall's Tau) or intersection measures (e.g. Rank Biased Overlap) to determine how similar two sets of rankings from two different groups are. But are there any statistical tests available to tell me which items in two lists are ranked significantly differently?

Thank you!

Answer 1

For ordinal (rank based) data, kendall concordance test holds good, as it calculates a normalized score for the number of matching or concordant rankings between the two samples.

Still you can also try other rank correlation methods like:

• Spearman’s Rank Correlation.
• Goodman and Kruskal’s Rank Correlation.
• Somers’ Rank Correlation.

This statistical methods quantifies the degree to which ranked variables are associated by a monotonic function, meaning an increasing or decreasing relationship.