I was informed of the concept of critical incident on Tuesday’s class, which reminded me of the research edge I met during the summer. Therefore, I decided to research more on critical incident technique and analyze my research edge by using this tool.
There was a question I raised in Unit 3 presentation as my research edge:
How to uncover the negative parts hidden in the city culture?
This question appeared in my mind because of the conversation with a middle-aged owner of enterprise, who is still paying a great effort to his business but the economic benefits are much less favorable than before based on objective facts. I would like to call him S.
The conversation took place in his company in Wenzhou. What I expected is to lead S to recall and talk about his own life stories, but he just avoided it and instead presented the slides showing how successful the company was between 1990 and 2010. On my way back home, I felt somehow disappointed since the data I collected in this talk were completely contrary to my expectation and this intervention was proved to be invalid to S.
However, I discovered the representativeness of S’s experience as enterprise owners in Wenzhou. Wenzhou was typical in the prosperous development of private businesses after the reform and opening up policy in China in 1990s. However, there are many entrepreneurs whose businesses went downhill because they failed to cope with market changes after 2010.
Meanwhile, after realizing this fact, I found S was not the only case during my editorial work period in August: Among all participants. there are more people who skipped over the dishonorable experiences in their career.
These made me wonder how to create a safe space for people to talk about their failures, or negative parts of their own life experiences, since culture significance of a city should not be composed of simple narratives which only state positive stuff.
The critical incident technique might work in making some progress for this question. As is defined by Flanagan (1954), “The critical incident technique consists of a set of procedures for collecting direct observations of human behavior in such a way as to facilitate their potential usefulness in solving practical problems and developing broad psychological principles”. My failure to explore further about negative parts of the personal experiences made me feel that it could be good to seek solutions to tackle this problem based on reacting to my participants’ responses to my clear demands and making adjustments accordingly.
And identified by Serrat (2017), I need to invest time in understanding what core questions need to be addressed. I would like to list them here and response to them preliminarily:
- What were the events or circumstances that led to the critical incident?
First, the vague theme for the first intervention, which just invited people to talk about their life stories in Wenzhou. Second, probably the insufficiently safe environment of the intervention.
- What were the behaviors of the agents that made these (events or circumstances)a critical incident?
People’s avoidance of talking about negative parts of their lives.
- What were the outcomes of the critical incident?
Less comprehensive data collection.
- What are the possible future outcomes if behaviors remain unchanged?
The project might yield limited knowledge in city culture exploration.
- What are the possible future outcomes if behaviors change based on lessonslearned?
The archive might be more valuable in revealing the culture significance of Wenzhou, which makes this project more fruitful.
Bibliography
Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), pp. 327–358. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061470
Serrat, O. (2017). The Critical Incident Technique. Knowledge Solutions. Singapore: Springer, pp. 1077-1083.