Hi everyone,

I am trying to determine an "order" of collected information about forest values from informants of different ethnic groups:

1) Using the free-listing method I collected the first ideas related to forest values.

Due to the diversity of collected items, each one was classified into a specific value category. That is to say, from the ~460 collected value items, I could aggregated them into 9 value categories. Ex: Item 1: "food"; Item 2: "shelter"; Item 3: "medicine" belong to "Life support", and so on for the other 8 categories.

2) After that, I asked the participants to rank how important each value category was. The scale had five level possibilities (5: very important; 4: important; 3: more or less; 2: little important; 1: not important at all). Each participant ranked forest in relation to its "Life support" value.

Now, for each value category I have in fact: 1) magnitude (frequency) and 2) a respective ranking.

Ex: Case x ---> Life support: 6 (frequency); and 5 (very important)

Is there a method that analyses both and allows to build a hierarchy (system) of those 9 value categories grouped by ethnic group, so interethnic differences in valuing forest can be recognized?