priorities then feed into procedures for selection and training, and also (continuing the pilot example) into cockpit instrument design. In healthcare, CIT is used in situations where direct examination of clinical staff and researchers can help them better understand their roles and help them solve practical problems. CIT allows clinical staff to better understand their roles in the clinical setting. Another advantage is that it helps them gain better knowledge about their interactions with patients and other clinicians. It also helps clinical staff better understand their practice from a variety of roles (e.g., physician, nurse, clinical educator, nurse informatician, faculty member). In healthcare research, CIT can be a good resource in identifying the experiences of a patient in the healthcare setting, exploring the dimensions of patient–provider interactions and determining patient responses to illnesses and treatments. CIT is also widely used in organizational development as a research technique for identification of organizational problems and is suitable for knowledge management in project-based organizations. CIT is used as an interview technique, where the informants are encouraged to talk about unusual organizational incidents instead of answering direct questions. Using CIT deemphasizes the inclusion of general opinions about management and working procedures, instead focusing on specific incidents. In market research, CIT has been used more frequently in the last ten years. Although the CIT method first appeared in the marketing literature thirty years ago, the major catalyst for use of the CIT method in service research appears to have been a Journal of Marketing study conducted by Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) that investigated sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in service encounters. Since the Bitner et al. article, nearly 200 CIT studies have appeared in marketing-related literature. CIT has also been used in studies of information-seeking behavior. The employment of CIT may also allow construction of typical scenarios of user behavior when they interact with various technologies including information systems. For this, researchers should solicit: the cause, description and outcome of a critical incident; users' feelings and perceptions of the situation; actions taken during the incident; changes (if any) in their future behavior. The typical scenarios may be presented visually as a diagram or a causal model. Advantages and disadvantages By identifying possible problems associated with major user–system or product complications, CIT recommendations try to ensure that the same type of situations do not result in a similar loss. There are both advantages and disadvantages