A case study of long-term Delphi accuracy

Article history: Received 15 January 2011 Received in revised form 1 July 2011 Accepted 3 July 2011 Available online 6 August 2011 We evaluated the long-term accuracy of predictions from a Delphic poll of the future of the mental health profession [1]. Six hundred participants provided predictions about the likely occurrence and probable time courses for 18 scenarios that could possibly have occurred over the 30-year interval between 1981 to present. Each of the panelists was polled twice with distributional feedback from the first poll provided on the second poll questionnaires. The data from the second polling was used to make predictions regarding the future of various issues that may have affected the mental health profession over the forecast interval. It has now been 30 years since the original poll was conducted; the purpose of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of the original group predictions. Results indicated that the Delphi panelists correctly predicted the occurrence of 14/18 scenarios. For those scenarios that did occur, the time course predictions were accurate within approximately 1–5 years. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.