A critical incident study of barriers to participation on the Cuckoo Trail, East Sussex

Abstract

There is growing interest in management research in new methods of collecting and analysing complex data, particularly in moving away from formal interviews towards the analysis of anecdotal evidence. A number of methods have been developed for this purpose. One such is the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), in which interviewees describe significant incidents that they have experienced with respect to a specific service. Much of the existing use of this method has been in the service sector, relating to encounters between service providers and their customers. This paper reports an attempt to broaden the boundaries of CIT, by applying it to the people-environment relationships found on non-motorized shared use routes in the countryside. While experiencing some difficulties in modifying the technique to cope with the research setting, the paper demonstrates how the relatively simple process of collecting anecdotal evidence can yield new insights into previously intractable management problems.