Critical Incident Technique in Information Behavior
Also known as: CIT in Information Behavior, Critical Incident Technique (LIS), Incident-Based Information Behavior Study, Flanagan CIT for Information Seeking
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.
Key highlights
- Grounds findings in concrete, recalled episodes rather than vague generalizations, improving accuracy and richness.
- Deliberately contrasts effective and ineffective incidents, surfacing barriers and breakdowns as well as successes.
- Inductive, data-driven categorization lets unexpected information needs and behaviours emerge from the evidence.
- Flexible and economical, adaptable to interviews, questionnaires or diaries across many information-behaviour contexts.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use CIT in information-behaviour research when you want grounded, concrete evidence of how people actually seek and use information, including where it succeeds and where it breaks down, rather than abstract self-reports. It is well suited to exploratory and needs-assessment studies, to evaluating services and systems by what really helped or hindered users, and to surfacing barriers and effective practices in a defined context. It is less appropriate for estimating prevalence in a population, for studying continuous routine behaviour that does not partition neatly into discrete incidents, or where participants cannot recall specific recent episodes. Because it relies on recalled first-hand accounts, applying it well means eliciting specific, recent incidents and analyzing enough of them to reach category saturation.
Strengths & limitations
- Grounds findings in concrete, recalled episodes rather than vague generalizations, improving accuracy and richness.
- Deliberately contrasts effective and ineffective incidents, surfacing barriers and breakdowns as well as successes.
- Inductive, data-driven categorization lets unexpected information needs and behaviours emerge from the evidence.
- Flexible and economical, adaptable to interviews, questionnaires or diaries across many information-behaviour contexts.
- Depends on participants' memory of specific incidents, so recall and selection bias can distort the corpus.
- Salient, dramatic incidents are over-reported while routine or minor information behaviour is under-represented.
- Inductive categorization is interpretive and analyst-dependent, requiring reliability checks to be credible.
- Yields qualitative patterns rather than prevalence estimates, limiting quantitative generalization.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
What makes an incident 'critical' in CIT?
An incident is a concrete, observable, reasonably complete episode of behaviour, and it is critical when it makes a significant positive or negative difference to the aim under study. In information-behaviour research the aim is usually resolving an information need or completing a task, so a critical incident is an episode of seeking or using information that clearly helped or hindered that aim — a search that succeeded against the odds, a barrier that blocked someone, a source that proved decisive. The significance to the aim, not drama for its own sake, is what makes the incident worth collecting.
Why collect both effective and ineffective incidents?
Because contrasting success and failure is far more diagnostic than studying either alone. Effective incidents show what behaviours, sources and conditions help people find and use information well; ineffective incidents expose the barriers, breakdowns and dysfunctional behaviours that derail them. Together they let researchers and designers reinforce what works and remove what does not. This deliberate positive/negative sampling is a defining feature of CIT and a key reason it is valued for service evaluation and needs assessment in information-behaviour research.
How is CIT applied to information behaviour rather than job performance?
The procedures are the same but the aim is reframed around information needs and use. Instead of asking which behaviours are critical to a job, the researcher asks participants to recount specific recent episodes in which they needed, sought or used information and it markedly helped or hindered them. These incidents are then content-analyzed into categories of information needs, behaviours, barriers and source roles, and the effective/ineffective contrast is interpreted to inform services, systems and training. The 2025 Libri review documents how extensively LIS researchers have adapted Flanagan's technique in exactly this way.
Sources
- 1.Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.
- 2.Sadeghi, H., Nowkarizi, M., & Tajafari, M. (2025). Applications of the Critical Incident Technique in Library and Information Science Research: A Literature Review. Libri, 75(2), 145-157.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 23). Critical Incident Technique in Information Behavior. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/library-information-science/critical-incident-technique-lis