The Interpretive Delphi: Repurposing a Consensus Instrument for Abductive Inquiry

Abstract

The Delphi method was built to manufacture agreement. Conceived at RAND to forecast the unforecastable, it iterates anonymous expert judgement until dispersion narrows, and reports the narrowing as its result. Six decades later, the instrument has migrated far from its origins — into health policy, education, management, planning — but its epistemology has travelled largely unexamined, and it arrives in interpretive research carrying assumptions that interpretive research explicitly rejects: that expert opinion approximates a truth, that convergence indicates validity, and that residual disagreement is noise to be reduced.

This article argues that the instrument can be kept and the epistemology discarded. It sets out the interpretive Delphi: a redesign in which the object of interest is not the consensus a panel reaches but the structure of the disagreement it fails to resolve. Three inversions are specified. Convergence is read as a diagnostic of shared institutional exposure rather than of correctness. Persistent divergence, ordinarily treated as panel failure, becomes the primary finding and the trigger for the next inferential move. And the second round is reconceived: it stops asking experts to revise towards the mean and starts asking them to explain why they will not.

The redesign is situated within abductive inquiry — Dubois and Gadde’s systematic combining — where the Delphi occupies a position no other instrument fills: it is the only technique that can, in a single operation, survey a field of expert judgement and mark the places where that field is internally contradictory. Those contradictions are precisely what abduction requires as input.

The article specifies the design, states the criteria of rigour appropriate to it (which are not those of the classical Delphi), addresses the standard objections — small panels, absent statistics, unreproducible consensus — and offers a reporting protocol. A worked illustration is drawn from a study of inter-institutional governance in a peripheral investment region.

Keywords: Delphi method; abduction; systematic combining; interpretive research; expert panels; qualitative rigour.

Received Date: February 25, 2025                  

Accepted Date: March 18, 2025                   

Published Date: April 01, 2025

Available Online at : https://www.ijsrisjournal.com/index.php/ojsfiles/article/view/787