Critique of the critical incident technique

Abstract

The CIT is a practical and efficient methodology that encourages participants to tell their story; with happenings that are memorable events in participants' lives. It is a form of story-telling, as participants share their singular experience as a story to the researcher. It is a qualitative, systematic, open-ended technique for educing descriptive data from participants as well as being an effective naturalistic tool for focusing participants' on a specific event. The CIT is a user-friendly instrument that can foster reflection and promote personal expression. The development of the CIT to generate indicators of specific happenings relative to research questions demonstrates the technique's suppleness and emphasises the capability of this methodology in nursing research. As nurses learn more about this methodology and its application to the study of nurses and nursing care, they will begin to comprehend how simple and effortless this technique is to use. The CIT can be developed to conform to any area of nursing and provide a more comprehensive awareness of what nurses do and the needs of our clients.

Critical Incident Technique applied in nursing and healthcare sciences

“…Similarly, adjectives like 'crucial', 'revealing', 'significant', 'important' or 'obvious' are used or preferred over 'critical'. Accordingly, it is of significance that the adjective intends to express or give the incident 'that extra certain something' and specific details that distinguish it from the common or everyday incident that the participant does not remember in the same way [6,7]. A very important difference is also that the specific incident focuses on the participant's behavior, and not the participant's attitudes, emotions, perceptions or opinions [2,4,5].…”

“…Every participant is expected to render two to three, but it will usually be far more critical incidents, which is why the number of participants in studies in nursing and healthcare contexts often need to amount to around 20-30 people [4]. But it is important to point out that the scope is based on the number of critical incidents provided and not on the number of participants involved [6], and that there are studies both within and outside nursing and healthcare contexts that comprise several thousand participants [10,11]. In order for the critical incident to be as complete and whole as possible, four requirements need to be set and met [8]: 1) focus on one (or more: but one at a time) critical incident that had a specific and strong positive or negative effect on the result of the phenomenon in question; 2) describe the incident precisely, carefully and thoroughly; 3) describe what led up to the incident; 4) describe how the incident's action impeded or assisted a successful or unsuccessful conclusion of the phenomenon in question.…”

“…One reason for this may be that the analysis level is descriptive and does not intend to interpret and is therefore seen as superficial from a nursing and health analysis perspective [4]. CIT with a focus on studying human behavior is, however, a suitable method to learn in order to have a tool in clinical practice when the intent is to identify as well as follow-up on individuals' (patients, personnel, relatives) behaviors and handling of care and treatment [5][6][7]. Therefore, the aim of this study was to elucidate is the ambiguity as to whether CIT is a methodology or a method [11].…”

Using the critical incident technique to research decision making regarding access to training and development in medium-sized enterprises

“…Butterfield et al, 2004;Gremler, 2004) suggest that a large majority of studies have used retrospective self-reports. A limitation of such studies is that they rely on the participant's ability to accurately provide a detailed account of an event (Sharoff, 2008).…”

“…We believed that the CIT using retrospective self-reports would be an effective exploratory tool for increasing knowledge about the little-known phenomenon of managerial decision making regarding employee access to structured T&D. We formed this view because the technique is recognised by researchers in a wide range of academic disciplines as one of the premier qualitative tools for investigating significant events (incidents) (Butterfield et al, 2004;Copes & Watts, 2000;Gremmler, 2004;Redmann, Lambrecht & Stitt-Gohdes, 2000;Sharoff, 2008). Another reason for using the CIT is that it focuses on respondents' accounts of significant events (incidents) that have actually happened, rather than on generalisations or opinions.…”