Confronta i metodi

	Critical Incident Technique in Information Behavior	Sense-Making Methodology
Campo	Library Information Science	Library Information Science
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1954	1998
Ideatore	John C. Flanagan (technique); applied to information behavior in LIS	Brenda Dervin
Tipo	Incident-based qualitative technique for studying effective and ineffective behavior	Methodology and metaphor for studying how people make sense across discontinuity
Fonte seminale	Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.	Dervin, B. (1998). Sense-making theory and practice: an overview of user interests in knowledge seeking and use. Journal of Knowledge Management, 2(2), 36-46.
Alias	CIT in Information Behavior, Critical Incident Technique (LIS), Incident-Based Information Behavior Study, Flanagan CIT for Information Seeking	Dervin Sense-Making, Situation-Gap-Use Model, Sense-Making Approach, Gap-Bridging Methodology
Correlati	3	3
Sintesi	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.	Sense-Making Methodology, developed by Brenda Dervin from the 1970s onward and synthesized in her 1998 overview, is a theory and method for studying how people construct meaning as they move through life and are repeatedly stopped by gaps in their understanding. Its central metaphor pictures a person moving through time-space, halted at a moment of discontinuity (a gap), and building a bridge across it by seeking and using information. Rather than classifying users by demographic traits, Sense-Making asks what situation a person was in, what gap or question they faced, and what help or use they sought — the situation-gap-use triad — elicited through the distinctive Time-Line and Micro-Moment interview. The approach reframes information not as an objective thing transmitted but as a construction people make sense of in context.