Expert judgments

The use of "expert judgments" as a research instrument is becoming increasingly popular in political science as a tool for obtaining knowledge about difficult to measure quantities. At its simplest, expert judgment methodology does "just what it says on the tin" — namely, to provide information on some objective or subjective state of the world based on a review by persons with comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of the area in question. When more than one expert is consulted, the solicitation of these judgments forms an "expert survey", the results of which are typically aggregated into some form of median or consensus opinion.