Nominal group technique

Decision support interventions

By Etiënne Rouwette and Alberto Franco

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1. Etiënne Rouwette (biography)
2. Alberto Franco (biography)

What are interventions to support team decision making? And how can interventions enable team decision making to become a rigorous, transparent and defensible process?

Interventions are procedures designed to improve a decision making process. Within the content of team decision making, an intervention is comprised of designed facilitated activities carried out in order to help a team achieve its goals. Team goals include generating a better and shared understanding of a situation of interest or concern, producing a recommendation on how to respond to the situation, or simply deciding what to do next regarding the situation.

Because team members are likely to have different views and goals regarding the situation, facilitation is central to an intervention. Specifically, facilitated activities are designed to encourage the active participation of team members in discussions, so that a mutual understanding within the team can be achieved. In addition, these activities also play a critical role in fostering the development of integrative solutions that create a sense of shared responsibility for their implementation.

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Generating evidence using the Delphi method

By Dmitry Khodyakov

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Dmitry Khodyakov (biography)

What is Delphi? How has the Delphi method stood up over time? How can the best of Delphi be adapted to new circumstances and problems?

The Delphi method is a group-based process for eliciting and aggregating opinion on a topic with a goal of exploring the existence of consensus among a diverse group of handpicked experts. The Delphi method was developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to obtain a reliable expert consensus, which is often used as a substitute for empirical evidence when it does not exist.

The four key characteristics of the Delphi method are:

  1. anonymity, 
  2. iterative data collection,
  3. participant feedback, and
  4. statistical determination of group response.

As a result, Delphi has become best practice for quantifying the results of group elicitation processes.

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Making the Nominal Group Technique more accessible

By Jason Olsen

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Jason Olsen (biography)

Looking to gain real insights from those with lived experience about a specific topic? Interested in a low-cost method that fosters equal participation and discussion over participant domination in a research focus group? Want to know about modifications to make pan-disability (ie., working with participants with different impairments) research focus groups more inclusive?

The Nominal Group Technique developed by Ven and Delbecq (1972) has been used for more than 50 years. Key to its success is the posing of a single unambiguous and unbiased question about a problem that can generate a wide range of answers. The process structures the meeting to enable critical dimensions of the question to be identified, ranked and rated in a way that:

  • limits the influence of the researcher leading the project, as well as the influence of attendees,
  • allows participants to clarify the question’s dimensions and gaps,
  • increases the likelihood of equal participation for all group members,
  • affords equal influence to different, and potentially conflicting, values and ideas.

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Ten dialogue methods for integrating judgments

By David McDonald, Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane

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1. David McDonald (biography)
2. Gabriele Bammer (biography)
3. Peter Deane (biography)

What formal dialogue methods can assist researchers in synthesising judgments about a complex societal or environmental issue when a range of parties with different perspectives are involved? How can researchers decide which methods will be most suitable for their purposes?

We review ten dialogue methods. Our purpose is not to describe the dialogue methods in detail, but instead to review the circumstances in which each method is likely to be most useful in a research context, bearing in mind that most methods a) were not developed for research, b) can be applied flexibly and c) have evolved into different variations. The methods are clustered into six groups:

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