Using the Delphi Method for Your Bachelor or Master Thesis

The Delphi method is increasingly common in bachelor and master theses across education, health sciences, management, and the social sciences — and for good reason. It lets students produce empirical, original findings without needing laboratory access, large samples, or expensive data collection. What it does need is more methodological rigour upfront than most students expect.

Why Supervisors Often Push Back on Delphi Proposals

The most common reason a supervisor hesitates when a student proposes Delphi is not that the method is wrong for the question — it's that the proposal doesn't show the student understands what they're committing to. A Delphi study means recruiting real experts, running two or more rounds, handling attrition, defining and justifying a consensus threshold, and writing a methodology chapter that can be defended in an oral examination. When those requirements aren't visible in the proposal, supervisors ask questions. The solution is to address each one explicitly before the proposal meeting, not after.

Choosing the Right Research Question

Not every thesis question is suited to Delphi. The method works best when there is genuine disagreement or knowledge fragmentation among experts — where no single authority has the full answer and structured, iterative feedback can narrow the range of positions. If your research question has a clear empirical answer in the existing literature, a systematic review will usually produce stronger work with less methodological complexity. Reserve Delphi for questions where expert judgment is the point — priority-setting, standard-development, or questions at the frontier of a field where evidence is thin.

Panel Size for Thesis Research

How Many Rounds Do You Need?

Two rounds are the practical minimum for a thesis Delphi and are widely accepted in the literature for studies where consensus is expected to emerge quickly. Three rounds are stronger methodologically — they allow you to test whether consensus held stable — but add 4–8 weeks to your timeline, which matters in a fixed-semester project. Choose based on what your research question requires, not what sounds most impressive. A well-run two-round study is more defensible than a three-round study where Round 3 added no new information.

Setting Your Consensus Threshold

This is the single most common methodological mistake in student Delphi work: defining the threshold after seeing the data. Your consensus definition — whether that's 70% agreement, 75%, an IQR of ≤1.5, or something else — must be stated in your protocol and your methods chapter before any round is run. This is the criterion you will be examined on most directly, because it's the clearest signal of whether you understood what you were designing. The most common thresholds in the academic literature are 70–80% agreement for percentage-based measures and an IQR of ≤1 or ≤1.5 for Likert-scale items.

What Your Methods Chapter Needs to Show

A methods chapter that covers these five areas gives examiners nothing to question about your process, which moves the viva conversation toward your findings instead.

Timeline Planning

The biggest practical risk for thesis students using Delphi is underestimating recruitment and round turnaround time. A realistic timeline for a two-round study:

This puts a two-round study at roughly 14 weeks from start to write-up — tight in a one-semester thesis, manageable with early planning, very difficult if recruitment takes longer than expected.

Choosing a Platform That Fits Thesis Constraints

Most thesis students run Delphi via email — assembling questionnaires in a survey tool, exporting data manually, building feedback summaries in a spreadsheet, then repeating for the next round. This works but takes significant time between rounds and introduces formatting inconsistencies that are hard to defend as rigorous. A dedicated Delphi platform removes that between-round labour entirely, which matters when you're working to a submission deadline and every week counts. Whatever you use, cite it in your methods section alongside how it shaped your round design — examiners increasingly ask about this, and a one-sentence answer in the methods section prevents a five-minute digression in a viva.