Group support systems (GSS) are increasingly being used within organizations to support group work. One area of support that is often desired is the scoring and ranking of alternatives on qualitative/subjective domains. In this article, we present a new, conceptual approach, the qualitative discriminant process, for scoring and ranking in GSS. This approach is based on well-established decision analysis techniques. It significantly advances the state of the art of GSS by addressing four common limitations: (1) the inability to deal with vagueness of human decision makers in articulating preferences; (2) difficulties in mapping qualitative evaluation to numeric estimates; (3) problems in aggregating individual preferences into meaningful group preference; and (4) the lack of simple, user-friendly techniques for dealing with a large number of decision alternatives. Our approach is easy to implement in stand-alone personal computers and GSS platforms. We illustrate this with a real-world problem on a prototype implementation. A qualitative discriminant process 391 Point Estimates Interval Estimates Interval Scales Category 1 Ratio Scales Category 2 Category 4 Category 3
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.