Critical Incident Technique - Principal Uses

Principal Uses

CIT can be used in a wide variety of areas. In general it is most useful in the early stages of development of large scale tasks and activity analysis within existing projects. This is mainly due to the method's ability to quickly separate out major problem areas that reside in a system.

In healthcare CIT is used in situations where direct examination of clinical staff and researchers can help them better understand their roles and help them solve practical problems. CIT allows clinical staff to better understand their roles in the clinical setting. Another advantage is that it helps them gain better knowledge about their interactions with patients and other clinicians. It also helps clinical staff better understand their practice from a variety of roles (e.g., physician, nurse, clinical educator, nurse informatician, faculty member). In healthcare research, CIT can be a good resource in identifying the experiences of a patient in the healthcare setting, exploring the dimensions of patient–provider interactions and determining patient responses to illnesses and treatments.

CIT is also widely used in organizational development as a research technique for identification of organizational problems. CIT is used as an interview technique, where the informants are encouraged to talk about unusual organizational incidents instead of answering direct questions. Using CIT deemphasizes the inclusion of general opinions about management and working procedures, instead focusing on specific incidents.

In market research, CIT has been used more frequently in the last ten years. Although the CIT method first appeared in the marketing literature thirty years ago, the major catalyst for use of the CIT method in service research appears to have been a Journal of Marketing study conducted by Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) that investigated sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in service encounters. Since the Bitner et al. article, nearly 200 CIT studies have appeared in marketing-related literature. For a useful overview, see Gremler's article in Journal of Service Research, Vol. 7, No. 1, August 2004.

CIT has also been used in studies of information-seeking behavior. See e.g. "How senior managers acquire and use information in environmental scanning" by Ethel Auster and Chun Wei Choo (1996); "Information sources used by lawyers in problem-solving: An empirical exploration" by Margaret Ann Wilkinson (2001); or "When Is 'Enough' Enough? Modeling the Information-Seeking and Stopping Behavior of Senior Arts Administrators" by Lisl Zach (2004).

The employment of CIT may also allow construction of typical scenarios of user behavior when they interact with various technologies including information systems. For this, researchers should solicit:

1. the cause, description and outcome of a critical incident
2. users' feelings and perceptions of the situation
3. actions taken during the incident
4. changes (if any) in their future behavior.

The typical scenarios may be presented visually as a diagram or a causal model. E.g., see the study "The use of interface agents for email notification in critical incidents" by Serenko 2006 published in the International Journal of Human–Computer Studies 64 (11), pp. 1084–1098.