Post-Hoc CIT: A Useful Method for Qualitative IS Research

Critical Incident Technique (CIT) is an underutilized method in IS research [31], despite heavy use in other management disciplines. This paper proposes that an adaptation of traditional CIT -- post-hoc critical incident (CI) analysis -- can be usefully applied to qualitative data collected in prior studies, to shed new light on IS theories using deductive or inductive analysis. To demonstrate the potential of post-hoc CIT we report on a pilot study that analysed nine incidents extracted from interview transcripts from two prior health IT case studies. We offer suggestive findings: one set based on deductive analysis of the extracted incidents and another based on inductive analysis. We discuss opportunities to use post-hoc CIT in future IS studies.