The Delphi Technique: Analysis of Responses to a Survey of Children's Mental Health Services Development

摘要

Analysis procedures were developed to analyze how well a modified Delphi survey process worked in developing consensus among a diverse group of experts. Procedures included: (1) measuring consensus among the experts' responses, (2) establishing statistical significance of responses, (3) determining which professional characteristics affected participants' responses, (4) determining how many experts and how many Delphi iterations would be needed for future surveys to identify R&D objectives, and (5) checking the reliability of the results. These procedures were applied to a modification of the Delphi technique which was used to survey experts in the area of children's mental health services to identify objectives for research and development in the children's area. The survey demonstrated that opinions and judgments generally considered to be too soft to be rigorous can be made amenable to measurement using the Delphi approach. Further, the measurements taken can be statistically analyzed yielding insight and understanding of the experts' position.