Critical Incident Case Study

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

While case studies of significant incidents or events have a long history of interest to scholars, the critical incident method as a method was first formalized by Colonel John C. Flanagan during World War II. His analytical efforts were focused on military persons and their work behaviors in order to determine which patterns of behaviors carried out in the conduct of a task were effective or noneffective; that is, those behaviors that were related to, and that were critical for, the success or failure of a task. In his first formulation, the critical incident method was described as a set of principles that could be used to study human behavior and its relation to a particular activity such as pilots engaged in the activities necessary to the flying of an airplane, or to a more specific event such as success or failure at properly and safely landing an aircraft. However, over the past five decades the critical incident method or critical incident technique has spread beyond its original behavioralist beginnings; and the method has since been both widely adopted and adapted across many disciplines for use in case-based research.

When used as the primary method for case research, the critical incident method normally has a particular event-based focus. That is, the method is used to investigate or explore particular types of events or incidents—those that researchers perceive to be critical in some way. By definition, these critical events are significant, unique, or unusual in some aspect of interest to the researcher. For example, they may be cases of failure or near failure, or of disaster, calamity, or catastrophe. Alternatively, they could be focused on unusual or significant cases of successful or serendipitous events or outcomes.

Critical incident case studies have the goal of exploring answers to questions such as who was involved in the event, what did these individuals do (or not do!), and how did their actions or inactions contribute to the incident or outcome? While originally developed to study, and consequently propositionally bounded by, the behaviors of persons and their relation to events or outcomes, the scope of critical incident case research has also expanded from its original behaviorally constrained domain. This technique and methodological approach is now being used to study not only persons' behavior(s), but also their cognitions, their emotional state(s), or almost any other individual characteristic of interest. In addition, the approach has moved beyond the individual; the range of antecedents, facilitating factors, or contributing variables to be investigated now include factors at the individual, group, or organizational levels and may also incorporate both internal and external variables of interest.

So useful is this approach to case study that it now is used in industrial and organizational psychology, education, medicine, engineering, human factors design, organizational analysis, and many other fields. Yet despite the enlargement of the domains in which the critical incident method has been used, the primary goal of using this approach to case study generally remains the same as its original purpose: the determination of the causal antecedents of an event and those critical actions or inactions taken by actors or agents that contributed to the event's or outcome's occurrence.

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