Risk Assessment Matrix Weighting of Regulatory Compliance Scores

According to the latest Child Care Licensing Study a large number of states utilize a risk assessment strategy in their differential monitoring approach. A side benefit of having developed a risk assessment and weighting of all the rules in a respective set of regulations is using those weights to determine regulatory compliance history scores for each program. Generally regulatory compliance history scores are determined by adding the violations for a particular inspection. When these violations are added up they all have the same weight, a weight of “1”. However, rather than adding the violations up this way, if the weights were taken into account for each violation and then applied to the score, it would increase the variability in the data dramatically.

In previous posts, it has been documented that licensing/regulatory compliance data lack a good deal of variability in their respective data distributions. Anyway that additional variability can be added should be undertaken from a statistical point of view. Let me illustrate my point in the following table:

Rules	Non-Weighted	Weighted
001	1	9
002	1	8
003	1	3
004	1	5
Total	4	25

As one can see from the above table, the use of weights changes the value of each violation significantly in moving it from a value of “1” in that a violation is determined to a weighted violation that ranges from “3 – 9” based upon a likert scale of 1 = “little risk” to 10 = “great deal of risk”. For those interested in this enhancement to determining regulatory compliance history, please consult NARA’s Licensing Curriculum and Course entitled Licensing Measurement and Systems or contact Dr Fiene at rfiene@naralicensing.org or rfiene@rikinstitute.com.