Design
A critical incident technique (CIT) study was conducted and
the data were collected between November 2005 and January
2006. CIT was first described by Flanagan (1954) and has
been used to explore psychiatric nursing (Cormack 1983), the
quality of nursing care (Norman et al. 1992, Redfern &
Norman 1999) and patients’ spiritual needs (Narayanasamy
& Owens 2001, Narayanasamy et al. 2004).
One advantage of using CIT in healthcare research is that it
is concerned with the real rather than the abstract world, and
is ideal for recreating practice experience (Cormack 2000).
Furthermore, it depends on descriptions of actual events
rather than things as they should be (Narayanasamy et al.
2004). However, the primary limitation of the method was
one also described by Cormack (2000): reliance on participants
to provide specific examples. While most students gave
full, detailed descriptions, some made vague, general statements
and the anonymous written format did not allow for
probing or clarification of meaning.