Critical incident technique and explicitation interviewing in studies of information behavior

Urquhart, C., Light, A., Thomas, R., Barker, A., Yeoman, A., Cooper, J., Armstrong, C., Fenton, R., Lonsdale, R. and Spink, S. (2003) Critical incident technique and explicitation interviewing in studies of information behavior in Journal of Library & Information Science Research, 25, pp63-88

The objectives are to discuss the effectiveness of two related techniques, critical incident technique and explicitation, used in a variety of social science research settings, and to critically review their application to studies of information behavior. The current application of both techniques is compared to Flanagan’s early guidelines on the critical incident technique and discussed in relation to recent experience in the use of the critical incident technique in the JUSTEIS and VIVOS projects, and also the use of explicitation in projects concerned with text entering on interactive Web sites. JUSTEIS is concerned with identifying trends, and reasons for those trends, in the uptake and use of electronic information services in higher education in the UK, and the paper examines experience gained over the first two cycles, 1999/2000, and 2000/2001. VIVOS was a one-year project (2000/2001) concerned with evaluation of virtual outreach services at various health library sites in England. Comparing the experiences gained on the projects suggests that critical incident methods could usefully be extended and enriched by some explicitation methods to elicit the degree of evocation required for current and future studies of Internet use.