5.4.7.2 Expert forum review (modified Delphi-based)
The literature review conducted led to the identification of capabilities and process areas for achieving built environment resilience. Since the capability areas were from a variety of studies on property and organisation resilience, a verification exercise was carried out to confirm their validity for achieving flood resilience of the built environment of businesses. This ensured that the capability areas identified are applicable to flood resilience in the built environment. Towards achieving a successful verification, a forum of experts was constituted. The forum consisted of built environment and disaster resilience practitioners, business owner, academics, and researchers (Table 6.1). The expert review process was based on modified Delphi approach.
The expert review process can be used to achieve a variety of objectives. It allows the collation of ideas towards decision-making. It was adopted in this study to confirm the applicability and suitability of the capability areas for achieving flood resilience and to refine and improve the conceptual model. As discovered in the literature review, capabilities for built environment resilience have not been expressly outlined. This necessitated the verification of capability areas.
119 i. verify the identified capability areas, ii. identify any further capability area and
iii. refine the conceptual capability maturity level definitions (See Appendix K). A detailed discussion on the expert review process is presented below (See Figure 5.11 for the flowchart of the expert review process).
Formation of the expert review process monitoring team
The author as part of this research undertook the monitoring of the expert review process. The capability areas to be verified have already been extracted from literature, and this was later followed by the refinement of the capability level definitions. The experts were asked to rate their agreement with each of the identified capability areas on a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, based on their suitability for enhancing built environment flood resilience.
Selection of panel members
The panel members are experts in disaster resilience; they also have direct knowledge of flood resilience and the built environment. This was expected to enable the panel members to furnish high-confidence information and as well add their extensive day-to- day experience. The choice was made of experts who have knowledge of the built environment, have experienced flooding, worked on the recovery of communities that have experienced flooding, disaster and flood-related policymaking or has flood protection or flood damage response experience and expertise in the built environment. Consideration was also given to the possession of an idea of general flood risk management strategies. CIRIA (2010) divided flood risk management into three phases; the phases are source control, pathway modification and receptor resilience (properties and people). The panel was also briefed on the significance of structural and non- structural areas of investment in flood risk management and how this relates to built environment resilience. The briefing was to ensure that panel members have an adequate information about what is expected from them.
The constituted panel represented property owners, businesses, and everyone concerned with the well-being of a property and business. To enhance the depth of representation, public and private sector experts were intentionally included. As earlier mentioned, expert forum review was undertaking after extracting detailed information from literature and
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structuring the information into a questionnaire made up of a list of capability areas. After that a conceptual model developed from the capability areas was given to the experts to review. Some existing building programmes, resource codes and standards were consulted alongside other literature.
A 10-member expert forum team were involved in capability area verification, and six experts were engaged in the conceptual capability maturity model review. The sizes of the expert review panels align with the proof provided by Boje and Murnighan (1982), the study observed no effect of group sizes on decision-making techniques when it engaged groups made up of 3, 7, and 11 members. Also, Adler and Ziglio (1996) submitted that the composition and quality of a panel matter more than the size especially when the heterogeneity of the panel is not prominent. Similarly, Powell (2002) acknowledged the variation in the number of participants in panel based research techniques, but submitted based on the comment of Murphy et al. (1998) that there is scant evidence of panel size on the credibility of outcomes and that an expert panel is not expected to be statistically representative but rather be made up of experts with appropriate qualities. Panel sizes ranging from 5 – 10 has also been engaged by previous researchers (Babatunde et al., 2016; Eadie, 2009)
The panel involved in this study was selected by making sure that all conceptual and specific areas relevant to the context of the study were identified and the ability and expertise of each respondent were determined. Table 5.2 shows the criteria used to ensure that the panel consists of all necessary areas of expertise. Alongside the listed attributes, it was ensured that:
All members of the panel are conversant with flooding and flood damage to premises/built environment either as a professional, flood victims, or researchers All are actively contributing to issues relating to flood and the built environment
through their areas of expertise to date,
All academics/researchers engaged have carried out extensive research in the area of flooding, communities, household and business recovery.
Although eighteen experts were initially spotted to have satisfied the selection criteria, 10 of them were available and engaged in the first round of review and six were available
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for the second iteration (discussion on the adequacy of panel members have been presented in section 5.4.2). Table 5.2 is the summary of the criteria for panel section. Table 5.2 Selection Criteria – Participants must belong to any of the identified categories (Adapted from Eadie, 2009)
SN Attributes necessary Remark Code names of the specific people Achieved with panel that was chosen 1 Business owner/Potential
user of research output
Represented LJ 1 of 10 adequate (more businesses will be engaged in case studies) 2 Business Recovery/Continuity Managers Represented LT, JR, KC 2 of 10 adequate 3 Built environment professionals Represented JR, EM, TS, RC 4 of 10 adequate 4 Academic/Researcher Represented EM, TS, PS 3 of 10
adequate 5 Insurance Professional/Risk
Managers/Loss Adjuster
Represented KH, TR 2 of 10 adequate 6 Engineers/Civil Engineers Represented LT, JR 2 of 10
adequate 7 Public and private sector
representatives
Represented All 10 of 10
adequate 8 Willing to take part in the
Delphi process
100% of panel All 10 of 10 adequate The expert review process
The selected panellists were contacted, and they indicated their readiness to participate in the study. It is important to state that the responsibilities of the experts were two, firstly, they were expected to do a verification by reviewing and rating the capability areas extracted from the literature and possibly add more. Secondly, they were expected to verify the capability areas during another round further and at the same time refine the capability maturity model that was developed using the capability areas.
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The first task was achieved using a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire administered to the selected and consented experts alone. The questionnaire was used as a method of knowledge extraction from the team of experts due to its suitability for numerically evaluating adequacy and consensus (Hsu & Sandford, 2007). A tightly aligned, structured instrument was recommended when confirmatory evaluations are desired (Harris & Brown, 2010). The questionnaire can be combined with an interview or other qualitative methods for confirming adequacy and accuracy of results (Harris & Brown, 2010). Questionnaires have the advantage of showing patterns while the qualitative interviews and reviews provide the opportunity of receiving in-depth insights on a phenomenon of interest (Kendall, 2008).
The appropriateness of the capability areas was to be established before they were used to develop the capability maturity model. Although it is possible to use a scale of 7 or 10, the use of a 5-point Likert scale is very popular in literature and affirmed as suitable. Revilla et al. (2014) argued that 7 – 11 answer categories on Likert scale yield data of lower quality compared to a 5-answer category scale. Midpoint marks are usually regarded as an acceptable mark, therefore in this research, 2.5 was set as the cut-off point. That is, only capability areas whose mean score is 2.5 or above was considered for conceptual model development and reviewed in subsequent expert panel review rounds (no capability scored below 2.5 eventually – See chapter 6).
The decision on the applicability of the capability areas during the scoring verification exercises was based on the level of agreement and importance attached to the capability areas by the expert team. Upon the completion of the scoring exercise, the capability areas were used to develop the capability maturity model. The expert panel then refined the capability areas and the model. Presented in Figure 5.11 is the flowchart of the Modified- Delphi based expert review process undertaken for the refinement of the capability areas and the conceptual capability maturity model. The first process of verifying the capability areas extracted from literature was based on a scoring system. Questionnaire containing the identified capability areas was used as a method of acquiring knowledge from the expert forum (this is discussed earlier – Chapter 6).
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Figure 5.11 Graphical illustration of the expert review process (Delphi)
As indicated in Figure 5.11, upon the completion of the expert review process, the research process continued with case studies. The data collection method used in the case studies is discussed in the next section – case study interviews.