As a rule, experts show more reliable results if they answer pre-posed questions, so when preparing a survey, they must be prepared in advance. Questions can be of the following types:
open – do not have ready-made answer options;
closed – experts are invited to choose one of the proposed options;
indirect – questions used in cases where the expert’s answer can characterize his moral and psychological qualities and there is a danger that the expert will not be completely sincere when answering, i.e. may distort the answer for ethical reasons.
According to the method of conducting, surveys can be individual or collective, full-time or absentee.
The advantages of the individual survey method include its less laboriousness, since there is no need to ensure the simultaneous appearance of all experts at the meeting. In addition, the opinion of individual experts is not dominated by the opinion of the majority or the most authoritative of them. But at the same time, experts in forecasting focus only on their idea of the object of forecasting and are deprived of the opportunity to take into account the diversity of information characteristic of a collective of people.
A collective survey is more time-consuming in terms of preparing a meeting, with a collective discussion there is an effect of psychological pressure from the opinion of the majority and the opinion of the most authoritative experts over the opinion of the rest. As the main advantage of a collective survey, it should be noted that in this case, experts get the opportunity to carry out their forecast, based not only on their own ideas about the forecasting object, but also to use a greater variety of information about the forecasting object, gleaned in the process of collective discussion. However, experts, in an effort to maintain a high assessment of their competence as a specialist, tend to defend a previously publicly expressed point of view, which means that they are psychologically less likely to perceive others who differ from their point of view, after they have publicly expressed their own.
Correspondence surveys are less time-consuming than face-to-face surveys, but there is always a danger that the expert does not correctly understand the question, and the surveyor does not have the opportunity to identify it.
For face-to-face surveys, everything is quite the opposite: they are more time-consuming, but there is less danger of getting answers to misunderstood questions, since in this case the surveyors are present when discussing the answers, which means that they have the opportunity to assess how correctly the questions are understood by experts.