Date: December 5, 2010 Time: 8:30 am - 12:30 (Half-day) Location: Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT Please register via Society for Risk Analysis Decision makers must frequently rely on data or information that is incomplete or inadequate in one way or another. Judgment, often from experts, then plays a critical role in the interpretation and characterization of those data. But how experts are selected and their judgments elicited matters – they can also strongly influence the opinions obtained and the analysis on which they rely. Several approaches to eliciting expert judgments have evolved. The workshop will cover topics ranging from expert recruitment, elicitation protocol design, different elicitation techniques (e.g., individual elicitations, Delphi method, nominal group technique, etc.) to aggregation methods for combining opinions of multiple experts. The role of expert elicitation and its limitations, problems, and risks in policy analysis will also be addressed. The workshop will include presentation of three case studies. The first one from EPA on using expert elicitation to determine the relationship between mortality and exposure to fine particulates. The second case study is a recent FDA study that evaluated the food safety hazards and preventive controls associated with transportation and holding of food commodities through an expert elicitation. The final case study will present EPA’s use of the Nominal Group Technique to rank research priorities for nano-TiO2 and nanomaterials more broadly. All three presentations will include a discussion of the expert selection process; elicitation protocol development, elicitation technique utilized, and the various issues that arose before, during, and after the elicitation process and the manner in which they were resolved. |