Peer Nominations: A Model, Literature Critique and a Paradigm for Research

Peer ratings have been empirically demonstrated to have remarkably high validity in the prediction of diverse future performance criteria and much research has been devoted to investigating the validity of peer ratings; however, no organized effort has been made to provide a theory of the process. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the peer ratings literature, and argues that the development of a theoretical foundation for sociometric analysis could be achieved by constructing a class of empirical decision process models which describe the thought processes people engage in while rating each other.