ABSTRACT

This chapter offers a way to simplify and facilitate the decision making involved in merging separate, qualitative rankings by suggesting which specific problems or groups of problems need to be compared, and which need not be, to arrive at a single, proposed, merged, health risk ranking. Relative weighting of individual vs. population risk also involves subjective, personal, societal, and ethical factors. Even making a single pair of comparisons of the information about two problems for both cancer and noncancer risks is very difficult, so that reducing the number of key comparisons that need to be made can be of considerable help. The chapter focuses on a method that provides guidance and a flexible framework for an organized decision process for selecting cell rankings which are in keeping with simple, quantitative ranking principles and with available information.