Testing inter-group ranking heterogeneity: do patient characteristics matter for prioritization of quality improvements in healthcare service?

Abstract In many research contexts, such as social science, marketing, education, psychology and medicine, it is frequently of interest to compare two or more groups of subjects (e.g. people of different gender, age or nationality), who are asked to rank a set of alternatives according to their personal liking or opinion, for investigating the presence of group effect. The common investigation aim is to detect customers with homogeneous preferences (or priorities) in order to serve each group as properly as possible. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for testing ranking heterogeneity among groups of subjects. This paper focuses on an approach considering diversity as a generalization of the notion of variation and investigates the performance of a testing procedure for ranking heterogeneity based on the index of segregation power. The performance of the testing procedure has been investigated via a Monte Carlo simulation study under several scenarios, differing for group size, number of ranked alternatives and systems of hypothesis. Furthermore, using a real data set, the testing procedure is exploited for investigating whether patient age and gender matter for patient prioritization of quality improvement in healthcare service.