مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The Rand Corporation (Santa Monica, California) developed the Delphi method in the 1950s with the aim of achieving a convergence of opinions across members of a panel of experts to forecast the impact of technology on warfare (Dalkey and Helmer, 1963; Linstone and Turoff, 1975). It is an iterative method with a number of iterations called rounds, in which each member of the panel anonymously replies to a questionnaire and subsequently receives feedback regarding the responses of the group. At each round, the experts are invited to revise their judgments in light of the feedback, producing, at least in principle, a progressive reduction of the range of answers and the consequent convergence of opinions. It is commonly recognized that the Delphi method makes better use of group interaction (Rowe et al., 1991), particularly compared with the face-to-face conference methods (Riggs, 1983).

Currently, the method is still broadly in use, generally in a decisionmaking context and/or a forecasting framework. Delphi has been so widely used that it is considered the foundation of a large variety of methods. During the last half century, several authors have developed a series of Delphi-derived methods; thus, to build a methodological framework for the method we propose in this paper, we present a brief historical overview, citing the most important methods.

In 1970, Murray Turoff proposed the Policy Delphi (Turoff, 1970), which is consensus-oriented and used for the analysis of public policies. A different version, called Public Delphi, is based on the participation of citizens. Soon after the Mini Delphi (Gustafson et al., 1973; Van de Ven and Delbecq, 1974) also known as Estimate-Talk-Estimate (ETE) was proposed, a technique that speeds up the procedure, as it is applied for face to face meetings.