CIICPD 2023

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

by Dagmar Sieglová

1. About Critical Incidents Critical incidents (CIs) are generally rendered as real-life situations carrying a significance to the person concerned. Being critical implies an experience of a crisis, a life-turning point, or a chance event charged with a strong emotional force that represents “a significant contribution, either positively or negatively, to the general aim of the activity” (Flanagan, 1954, p. 338). As events exceeding the bounds of normality, CIs catch a person unprepared and require quick reactions, interpretations, decisions and actions. CIs usually become deeply ingrained in a person’s memory, typically leading to a further search for meanings and understanding of the experience in order to “make sense of the world” (Kain, 2004, p. 85). As such, CIs can serve as “catalysts for discovery and innovation” (Hudges, 2008, p. 51) in an individual’s future life. The Critical Incident Technique (CIT) thus represents a qualitative research method using CIs as instances of a specific activity experienced and described by the research participants. The technique offers a “practical step-by-step approach to collecting and analysing information about human activities and their significance to the people involved” (Hughes, 2008, p. 49). It is capable of yielding rich, contextualised data that come in varied forms and serve as model situations in a wide degree of awareness. As oral testimonies, storytelling or anecdotal remarks, written narratives of varied scope, informal observations or collected in a pre-structured format, CIs can remain either barely noticed by the person involved or used as data for a second party as research of various theoretical or practical use. Using examples from scholarly teams participating in the CIICPD project from five European countries, this publication shows the profound scientific as well as professional potential in varied uses of CIs within the field of diversity management and intercultural communication, pointing out a need to extend cooperation between the HEIs and the world of work. The purpose of the introductory chapter is to review the use of the CIT in its initial stages during the 1940s and 1950s and its development during the subsequent five decades, in order to set a baseline for illustrating the new emerging trends of the early 21 st century. 1.1 Early Developments The use of CIs has its first recorded history as a method for qualitative research with a practical application into wide areas of practice in the United States, around the time of the Second World War (Flanagan, 1954). In its early developments, the CI approach can be first observed in the military practice of the American army, but soon studies in human behaviour using CIs spread to the civilian, specifically educational sphere. First was the Aviation Psychology Program of the USAAF that adopted working with CIs for recruitment purposes. The programme’s first two studies were analysing reasons for pilot failures, one (Miller, 1947) conducted in 1941, during their recruiting procedures, and the other (Flanagan, 1947) carried out between 1943–1944, during

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