Methoden vergleichen

	Critical Incident Technique in Information Behavior	Information Encountering Analysis
Fachgebiet	Library Information Science	Library Information Science
Familie	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Entstehungsjahr	1954	1999
Urheber	John C. Flanagan (technique); applied to information behavior in LIS	Sanda Erdelez
Typ	Incident-based qualitative technique for studying effective and ineffective behavior	Conceptual framework and analysis of accidental information discovery
Wegweisende Quelle	Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.	Erdelez, S. (1999). Information encountering: It's more than just bumping into information. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, 25(3), 26-29.
Aliasnamen	CIT in Information Behavior, Critical Incident Technique (LIS), Incident-Based Information Behavior Study, Flanagan CIT for Information Seeking	Information Encountering, Erdelez Information Encountering, Accidental Information Discovery, Incidental Information Acquisition Analysis
Verwandt	3	3
Zusammenfassung	The Critical Incident Technique (CIT), set out by John Flanagan in his 1954 Psychological Bulletin article, is a flexible set of procedures for collecting first-hand accounts of specific, observable incidents that were especially helpful or unhelpful in achieving some aim, and content-analyzing them to understand effective and ineffective behaviour. In library and information science it has become a widely used method for studying information seeking and use: instead of asking people in the abstract how they look for information, researchers ask them to recount concrete recent episodes — a time they urgently needed information, succeeded or failed to find it, encountered a barrier, or used a source to good or ill effect. Analyzing many such incidents yields grounded categories of information needs, behaviours, barriers and source roles. A 2025 Libri review documents the technique's broad application across LIS information-behaviour research.	Information Encountering Analysis, developed by Sanda Erdelez and articulated in her 1999 Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science article 'Information encountering: It's more than just bumping into information,' studies how people acquire useful information by accident — while searching for something else, or while not searching at all. Against the dominant picture of information behaviour as goal-directed seeking, Erdelez foregrounds serendipitous, incidental discovery as a distinct and important mode. She models an encounter as a sequence of functional steps — noticing, stopping, examining, capturing and returning — and classifies people by how readily they encounter information, from non-encounterers to 'super-encounterers' who experience and exploit accidental discovery frequently. The framework gives a vocabulary and analytic structure for a phenomenon long dismissed as mere luck.