The selection, or identification, of criteria
and indicators is the first step in any process of creation of an index or any
evaluation of options. The Delphi method, as a participatory process to
accomplish the task of selecting, or identifying, criteria and indicators has
proven to increase the validity and acceptance of the project’s results
independently of its area of application, as both criteria and indicators are
key structuring components for projects. Selecting, or identifying, criteria
and indicators benefits form a multidisciplinary sphere often including the
involvement of multiple stakeholders like decision makers, experts and
ultimately the population affected by future decisions. The engagement of all
these actors in the process increases outcomes’ chances of being deemed more
credible, scientific, commonly understood and technically useful. Is has been
established that Delphi enables the involvement of all the actors in an
iterative and anonymous way, towards a shared understanding undoing all social
pressures to conform. However, its characteristics of successive interrogation
and questioning format make it a highly resource and time consuming technique
to employ. Not anymore with Welphi’s web-based environment and automation
features enabling for the development of Delphi processes in an easy way.
Let us resort to our latest introduced Welphi
case study – The Euro-Healthy project – to broadly explain how Welphi was used
for the selection of indicators to build a population health index.
In the scope of the Euro-Healthy project, Welphi
processes were developed, comprising a total of three rounds, to involve a
multidisciplinary panel and to establish their views on the relevance of the
identified indicators, with specific rules, resulting to Welphi’s rule building
features, in place for dealing with differences in opinion and for measuring
the level of agreement1.
|Aim: to apply a participatory process
to inform the selection of a set of indicators considered relevant combining
scientific evidence and the points of view of experts and stakeholders.
|Objects of study: 130 indicators, previously
identified through literature review.
|Panel: 51
experts and 30 stakeholders from different countries, with applicable knowledge
in a variety of domains and a keen level of interest in the field of European
population health.
|1st round: Panelists were required to
indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with the following statement
“This indicator is
relevant to the evaluation of Europe’s population health”
Panelists must choose one of the 5
following options, belonging to a 5-level Likert scale: “Strongly disagree”, “Disagree”,
“Neither agree nor disagree”, “Agree” and “Strongly Agree”.
|2nd and 3rd
rounds: The
extracted results of the 1st round were presented at the
beginning of the 2nd round, allowing panelists to maintain or
revise their answers. At the beginning of the 3rd round, panelists
received again information synthesizing the answers of the panel after the 2nd round.
Accordingly, these had the opportunity to maintain or revise their answers.
|Results: The group opinion (aggregate of
individual opinions) was defined by calculating the percentage of responses
given in each Likert item, for each indicator. The group agreement for
indicator approval was determined by absolute majority (agreement above 50% and
disagreement below 33.3%) and qualified majority (agreement above 75%)1.
Check out our support page (http://support.welphi.com/video-tutorials/)
and watch our video tutorials to help setup your Welphi process today for
selecting, or identifying, your project’s structuring components, whichever
your framework might be! Start your free trial today to find our Welphi process
“Demo – Selection of indicators for health index”, based in the Welphi case-study
– Euro-Healthy.
1 A. Freitas and P. Santana “The
selection of indicators to evaluate European population health”, http://www.euro-healthy.eu/documents/indicator-selection.
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