Critical Incident Technique in Information Behavior

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.