CIICPD 2023

The CIT defined by Flanagan as “a set of procedures for collecting direct observations of human behaviour in such a way as to facilitate their potential usefulness in solving practical problems” (p. 1) penetrated additional professions around the new millennium, but changed during the upcoming decades due to multiple perspectives. First, the technique spread to other social and scientific areas, continually proving its wide applicability within multiple fields. Besides the above-mentioned army, industrial or business psychology settings, the CIT was further adopted in health sciences (Bradley, 1992), specifically in nursing (e.g., Chambers, 1988; Keatinge, 2002; Kemppainen, 2000), medicine (e.g., Altmaier et. al, 1997; Goertzen et al., 1995; Holmwood, 1997) or dentistry (e.g., Victoroff and Hogan, 2006; FitzGerald et al., 2008; Henzi et al., 2007). It also started being used in psychology (e.g., Pope and Vetter, 1992), counselling (e.g., Dix and Savickas, 1995), communications (e.g., Query and Write, 2003), job analysis (e.g., Stitt-Gohdes et al., 2000), marketing (e.g., Keaveney, 1995), social work (e.g., Mills and Vine, 1990), or education and teaching (e.g., LeMare and Sohbat, 2002; Oaklief, 1976; Tirri and Koro-Ljungberg, 2002), to name a few. The second direction the CIT took in its post-war development relates to the procedures used. Starting with the emphasis on behaviourally grounded expert “direct observations”, as originally conceived by Flanagan (1954), “retrospective self-reports” (Butterfield et al., 2005) of the participants dominated the studies toward the end of the millennium. This turned the CIT, as Butterfield (2005) notes, from a “task analysis tool” (p. 489) helping “to uncover existing realities or truths so they could be measured, predicted, and ultimately controlled” (p. 482) into an “exploratory and investigative tool” (Butterfield, 2005, p. 489; Chell, 1998; Woolsey, 1986) with a strong emphasis on a flexible practical applicability within a particular professional area. Along with the diversification of the approaches to the use of the CIT goes a proliferation of terminology, adding the original CIT new variants, such as the CI analysis (Gould, 1999), CI exercise (Rutman, 1996), CI study technique (Cottrell et al., 2002) or CI reflection (Francis, 1995). The flexibility of the technique, however, raised new questions of validity of the methods, as exact descriptions of the data-analysis procedures, were frequently missing in the earlier studies. As a result, a team of researchers from the University of British Colombia (UBC) (Butterfield et al., 2005, 2009) introduced a refined version of the technique known as the Enhanced Critical Incident Technique (ECIT). One of the adjustments the ECIT research procedure brought is keeping more exact records of the data, including taping when adopting oral data collection methods, to achieve their higher descriptive validity. This approach allows not only for retrospective accuracy checks, but also for more exact raw material, more specific data analysis, as well as enhanced exhaustiveness and trustworthiness of results. With this in mind, the researchers defined nine credibility checks (Figure 2) to the final stage of the procedure.

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