Critical Incident Technique in the Basket

Different IS research methods focus on or measure different aspects of IS phenomena, and diversity of methods within and across studies contributes to the accumulation of strong evidence to support IS theories. We conducted a systematic and reproducible review of ten years of Critical Incident Technique (“CIT”) studies published in the IS Scholars Basket of eight journals. CIT is used extensively in industrial and organizational psychology, marketing and other business disciplines. In IS Basket journals 13 papers fully or partially applied CIT as a research method. We classified these studies per three key elements incident elicitation, selection, and analysis—and seven criteria employed in other disciplines’ CIT studies. We found that few studies used “full” CIT and we conclude that CIT is underutilized as a research method in IS. Our paper contributes by offering CIT guidelines for authors and reviewers and suggestions for using CIT to build stronger IS theories.