beginning the author’s intention to make the respective fact known. The purpose of
making public certain fragments of critical incident or a collection of them is the
transformation of one’s own experiences into flashlights for the professional community,
raising awareness about the cognitive dissonance, and adaptation of the intervention
forms to the new developments in counselling.
Before recently, critical incidents belonged to naturalistic research, such as ethnography
and anthropology. Only in the second half of the 20th century did C. Wright Mills,
American sociologist, promote the method of the reflexive file, which he called
“investigation file” due to the fact that it was organized thematically and not
chronologically. The method is still applicable in education, where the significance of
what is happening is for teachers more important than when it did. Moreover, the
conceptualisation effort of creating the data and the analysis of the opportunities offered
by a critical incident exceeds the range of basic educational competence.
The critical incident is a qualitative research method in psychological counselling, put
forth by Flanagan (1954). For many years now, the German federal employment agency –
Bundesagentur für Arbeit, through the University of Mannheim – has been integrating the
incident technique in the methodology of counsellors’ training.
Theoretical background
In any field of activity can occur a sum of situations that have not been foreseen in the
initial training. Even less predictable is the training as regards to the qualitative research
in counselling and guidance – where each case is unique through the input of the
problem, the specificity of personalities involved, the context, the perceived measure of
success – the novel situations are what give the particular note of professional ability and
competence.
Clients and counsellors placed for starters in typical situations will be able to define
“critical incidents” as moments in which their basic qualification does not offer enough
leverage to solve the given case.
For experienced counsellors in a “critical incident”, the next move recommended
according to the current knowledge, aptitude, and capacity would limit the options, either
unfavourable in the long run, either not based on realistic resources. The critical incident
technique is the constructive approach to the apparent conflict between a concrete
demand expressed in the counselling case and the limited possibility of meeting it. This is
the meaning promoted in the present work.
In fact, the specialists discovering a breach in their own professional knowledge or
experience are applying to themselves the teaching method of problem posing. This
autogenic experiment keeps its formative value on the condition that the element of