What is Open-Access Online Delphi Studies (OAODS)

This chapter describes the work of creating multimodal open-access online Delphi studies (OAODS). These are electronic Delphi studies that do not begin with an invited group of identified experts to seat a Delphi panel but rather with self-identified domain-specific authorities active on the Social Web, with post-data-collection vetting of the participants (when knowable) and their responses. This chapter explores how to design such instruments with efficacy and nuance, and built-in tests of respondent expertise, and fraud detection, and further, how to test such instruments for efficacy, reliability, and validity, while using some of the latest features available in online survey research platforms. The platform used in this work is the Qualtrics Research Suite.