CIICPD 2023

bombing missions. Studies that followed focused on recognising incidents of experienced effective and ineffective behaviours recollected from the practice of the war veterans (Wickert, 1947), in order to improve combat leadership. Or they studied the experience of disorientation or vertigo in pilots, planning to use the data for developing a better designed cockpit and instruments (Wickert, 1947; Fitts and Jones, 1947). A group of psychologists from the USAAF soon established a scholarly non-profit organisation the American Institute for Research (AIR), focused on systematic research in human behaviour that led to the development of the critical incident technique (CIT) as a fully established research procedure. Following the initiatives from the Aviation Psychology Program, their first activities aimed at defining job requirements, including aptitudes and personal characteristics, for air force officers (Preston, 1948) or pilots (Gordon, 1947; Gordon, 1949). Similarly, requirements for personnel in physical sciences were studied in a project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (Flanagan et.al, 1949), or for air route traffic controllers in a project for the Civic Aeronautics Administration (Nagay, 1949). The CIT then penetrated into the industrial sphere when it was applied to record the quality of job performance of the employees for the General Motors Corporation (Miller and Flanagan, 1950). Many studies of the CIs also come from varied scientific projects conducted at the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) by Flanagan’s students in the form of doctoral theses (Flanagan, 1954). Their works focused on studying requirements, proficiency and general abilities in varied professions, e.g. of dentists in their practice, industrial foremen in the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, managers in life insurance agencies, instructors of general psychology courses, or salesclerks in department stores. Based on finding a higher occurrence of ineffective behaviours in students with respect to study and behavioural issues (Eilbert, 1953), CIs were used by the faculty to probe into the students’ emotional immaturity, in order to develop a relevant classification system. This in fact set up the basis for using the CIT to study personality and human behaviour. By the time of the early works, several practical applications of the CIs, which embraced varied approaches to the method, can be observed (Flanagan, 1954). Both studies of the USAAF and the AIR first used the CIs to measure and evaluate job performance or proficiency including aptitudes and abilities in varied types of job positions, like pilots, teachers or chefs. This contributed to improving the recruitment procedures by defining more specific descriptions of job requirements, as well as helping to develop specific training programmes of new employees as a first record of using the CIs for educational purposes. The results of the aforementioned studies also set a base for refining operating procedures or adjusting work environment and tools. The use of CIs as a “very valuable supplementary tool for the study of attitudes” (Flanagan, 1954, p. 28) mainly determined by the works from the Department of Psychology at Pitt, can then be seen as the first attempts to study leadership and motivation or counseling and psychotherapy. 1.2 The Critical Incident Technique (CIT) The early work with CIs resulted in the CIT, first described by John Flanagan in 1954 as an established qualitative research five-step scientific procedure (Figure 1). While allowing for flexible data collection and analysis typical for qualitative research, the

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