OBJECTIVES To compare two consensus development methods commonly used for developing clinical guidelines in terms of the judgments produced, closeness of consensus, amount of change between rounds, concordance with research evidence and reliability. METHODS In all, 213 general practitioners and mental health professionals from England participated in four Delphi and four nominal groups. They ...

Objective. To describe the main qualitative research techniques through systematic review of Spanish studies published during the previous 5 years. Design. Systematic review. Data sources. The Índice Médico Español (bibliographic database of items published in Spanish health sciences journals) was searched, and systematic searches of the journals Atención Primaria, Gaceta Sanitaria, and Revista...

This paper systematically reviews empirical studies looking at the effectiveness of the Delphi technique, and provides a critique of this research. Findings suggest that Delphi groups outperform statistical groups (by 12 studies to two with two ‘ties’) and standard interacting groups (by five studies to one with two ‘ties’), although there is no consistent evidence that the technique outperform...

This paper presents Delphi, a mobile software controller that helps applications select the best network among available choices for their data transfers. Delphi optimizes a specified objective such as transfer completion time, or energy per byte transferred, or the monetary cost of a transfer. It has four components: a performance predictor that uses features gathered by a network monitor, and...

BACKGROUND The Delphi technique is widely used for the development of guidance in palliative care, having impact on decisions with relevance for patient care. AIM To systematically examine the application of the Delphi technique for the development of best practice guidelines in palliative care. DESIGN A methodological systematic review was undertaken using the databases PubMed, CINAHL, Web...

Nowadays, the plant location selection has a critical impact on the performance of numerous companies. In this paper, a methodology is presented to solve this problem. The three decision making methods, namely Delphi, AHP and improved VIKOR, are hybridized in order to make the best use of information available based on the decision makers or experts. In this respect, the aim of using Delphi is ...

A Web-enabled hybrid approach to strategic marketing planning is established in this paper. The proposed approach combines the group Delphi technique with a Web-based expert system, called WebStra (developed by the author), to support some key stages of the strategic marketing planning process. The Web-enabled approach is based upon client–server architecture that enables the sharing and delive...

This paper reports on a Delphi study undertaken by a health librarian and two midwifery professionals, to determine the research priorities of midwives working in NHS Highland. Six important topics were identified: workforce issues, second stage of labour, obesity in pregnancy, women’s expectations of pregnancy and of childbirth, place of birth, and breastfeeding. Related evidence was examined ...

The use of online interactive questionnaires is an interesting example of human-computer interactions mediatizing human interactions to support the emergence of collective intelligence. To better understand these interactions and their various effects, we propose to investigate the operating mode of interactive questionnaires. First, we recall what the questionnaires are made of in order to kno...

Correspondence: Catherine Powell, School of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Southampton, Nightingale Building (67), Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK. E-mail: [email protected] POWELL C. (2003) Journal of Advanced Nursing 41(4), 376–382 The Delphi technique: myths and realities Aim. To outline the key concepts and principles of the Delphi technique. Methods. Reference is made to a selectio...