Fifty years of the critical incident technique: 1954-2004 and beyond

By Lee D. Butterfield, William A. Borgen, N. Amundson, Asa-Sophia T. Maglio. 2005

1,067 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has now been 50 years since Flanagan (1954) published his classic article on the critical incident technique (CIT) - a qualitative research method that is still widely used today. This article reviews the origin and evolution of the CIT during the past 50 years, discusses CIT’s place within the qualitative research tradition, examines the robustness of the method, and offers some recommendations for using the CIT as we look forward to its next 50 years of use. The focus of this article is primarily on the use of the CIT in counselling psychology, although other disciplines are touched upon.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0509067c71d0e615fccb58e200d0b97c91b0ffed

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Citations in the corpus

An exploration of employer perceptions of graduate student employability (2018, methodology): “CIT is a commonly used effective qualitative research methods tool for exploratory and investigative research (Butterfield et al., 2005; Flanagan, 1954).”
The emotional impact on and coping strategies employed by police teams investigating internet child exploitation (2008, methodology): “…by Flanagan (1954), CIT has been applied to research in areas including nursing, job analysis, counseling, education and teaching, medicine, marketing, organizational learning, performance appraisal, psychology, and social work (Butterfield, Borgen, Amundson, & Maglio, 2005; Woolsey, 1986).”
The challenge of leading on unstable ground: Triggers that activate social identity faultlines (2009, methodology): “Interviewers were trained to first establish rapport and then to use a critical incident approach (Butterfield et al., 2005; Flanagan, 1954) to identify events that had resulted in social identity conflicts.”
The Development of Empathic Perspective‐Taking in an Engineering Ethics Course (2017, methodology): “As a final step, categories are described narratively “with operational definitions and self-descriptive titles” (Butterfield et al., 2005, p. 483).”
Language learning motivation through a small lens: A research agenda (2016, methodology): “The literature on critical incident analysis suggests that there are no straightforward criteria for determining what makes an incident ‘critical’ or significant, and that in many cases the criticality or significance of an event does not become apparent until much later (Butterfield et al. 2005).”
What Helps and What Hinders in Cross-Cultural Clinical Supervision (2013, background): “For a good discussion on the complicated issues concerning reliability and validity in CIT, please read Butterfield et al. (2005). For the present study, we prefer a positivistic approach.”
What triggers imposter phenomenon among academic faculty? A critical incident study exploring antecedents, coping, and development opportunities (2017, methodology): “Consistent with content analysis procedures noted by Butterfield et al. (2005) based on Driscoll and Cooper (1994) CIT directions, we took an inductive approach to analysing the data given the exploratory nature of describing faculty experiences.”
Using the Enhanced Critical Incident Technique in Counselling Psychology Research (2009, methodology): “Do you think there is anything missing based on your experience (Butterfield et al., 2005; Flanagan, 1954)?”