Compare methods

	Lawshe Content Validity Ratio	Critical Incident Technique
Field	Organizational Behavior	Organizational Behavior
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1975	1954
Originator	Charles H. Lawshe	John C. Flanagan
Type	Quantitative content-validity index from expert ratings	Qualitative behavior-elicitation and classification procedure
Seminal source	Lawshe, C. H. (1975). A quantitative approach to content validity. Personnel Psychology, 28(4), 563-575.	Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.
Aliases	CVR, Content Validity Ratio, Lawshe Method, Content Validity Index	CIT, Flanagan Critical Incident Technique, Critical Incidents Method, Critical Incident Analysis
Related	3	3
Summary	The Lawshe content validity ratio (CVR) is a simple, quantitative method for judging whether the items of a test or measure actually represent the content they are meant to cover, based on the agreement of a panel of subject-matter experts. Charles Lawshe introduced it in 1975 to address a gap in personnel testing: content validity had long been treated as a matter of judgment with no number attached, leaving practitioners unable to defend item retention decisions objectively. Lawshe's insight was to ask experts a focused question, is this item essential, useful but not essential, or not necessary, and to convert the proportion who call an item essential into a ratio that ranges from minus one to plus one. Items whose CVR exceeds a critical value tied to panel size are retained, and the average CVR of retained items gives a content validity index for the whole instrument. The method's clarity made it a durable standard in test development. It is especially common in human resources, nursing, and health-measure validation.	The critical incident technique (CIT) is a qualitative procedure for studying human behavior by collecting and classifying detailed accounts of specific incidents in which behavior was especially effective or ineffective in achieving an aim. John Flanagan introduced it in his landmark 1954 Psychological Bulletin article, drawing on his work selecting and classifying aircrew in World War II, where vague trait descriptions had proved useless and concrete behavioral accounts proved decisive. Rather than asking people for opinions or generalities, CIT asks observers to recount what actually happened, what the person did, and why it mattered, then builds a framework of behavioral requirements inductively from those accounts. The technique gave applied psychology a rigorous, replicable way to derive job requirements, performance criteria, and training content from real behavior. It remains a foundational method underlying job analysis, behaviorally anchored rating scales, and competency modeling. Its hallmark is grounding abstract requirements in observable, situated action.