Methoden vergleichen

	Information Encountering Analysis	Critical Incident Technique in Information Behavior
Fachgebiet	Library Information Science	Library Information Science
Familie	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Entstehungsjahr	1999	1954
Urheber	Sanda Erdelez	John C. Flanagan (technique); applied to information behavior in LIS
Typ	Conceptual framework and analysis of accidental information discovery	Incident-based qualitative technique for studying effective and ineffective behavior
Wegweisende Quelle	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.	Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.
Aliasnamen	Information Encountering, Erdelez Information Encountering, Accidental Information Discovery, Incidental Information Acquisition Analysis	CIT in Information Behavior, Critical Incident Technique (LIS), Incident-Based Information Behavior Study, Flanagan CIT for Information Seeking
Verwandt	3	3
Zusammenfassung	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.	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.