Information Literacy and the Craap Test

CRAAP is a useful acronym to help all people develop information literacy and media literacy. The acronym asks the researcher to check source currency, source relevance, source authority, source accuracy, and source purpose. This exercise will apply the CRAAP test to a source I found related to my research question on criminal psychology. Specifically, I am looking for information on police interrogation tactics and false confessions.
Source: Nesterak, E. (2014). Coerced to confess. The Psych Report. 21 Oct, 2014. http://thepsychreport.com/conversations/coerced-to-confess-the-psychology-of-false-confessions/
1. Currency: The Nesterak (2014) source is 3 years old, making it fairly current. Because the topic of false confessions and criminal justice is not as time-sensitive as, say, research on an emerging technology, I believe that three years old is sufficiently current for this research.
2. Relevance: The Nesterak (2014) source is directly related to my research topic on false confessions and police interrogation. Because this source is written for a general audience, it might not be as relevant as an experimental study, but not all of my sources need to be experimental studies. It is also helpful to see how others are conceptualizing false confessions.
3. Authority: The author is also the editor of The Psych Report, the publication in which it appears. This does not automatically discredit it. In fact, although it is not a peer-reviewed journal, The Psych Report is a publication of a non-profit organization that disallows commercial advertising and is essentially a behavioral science magazine. In this article, the author interviews a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is part of SUNY and therefore a credible and reliable source of information. This article is not as good a source as one that appears in a journal with experimental evidence, but it is still authoritative.
4. Accuracy. This source is backed up with a long list of references to substantiate the claims made, so yes, it can be considered accurate.
5. Purpose: The purpose of this source is to inform and provide information to the reader. The reader is a general audiences.
I believe this source passes the CRAAP test. It is important to apply this means of evaluating sources because of all the “crap” that is out there on the internet. Often it does take some time and energy to poke around, to see who the author is and what the publication is. Many sources look like they are official, educational, or in an academic journal but they are not. There are fake journals out there, and it is important to research the journal as well as the evidence presented.
Assignment 2
This week has been productive, in that I am getting used to the process of research and applying the CRAAP test to every source. I have had some insight into the work it takes to be thorough in academic research, such as by verifying the sources of claims and seeking corroboration for the evidence. I was surprised by the number of fake journals out there on the Internet, and disappointed in the people who put a “PhD” next to their name and expect that alone to make the source credible. Likewise, I am surprised by the number of websites that try to appear official or scholarly. I do not necessarily have questions, other than wondering if there will eventually be a software that helps to assign an algorithm to the CRAAP test. I also have a question regarding the underlying credibility of even those sources that appear in peer-reviewed journals. Many of these are not necessarily reliable, in that some use spurious research methodologies. Learning how to be information literate and media literate is a lifetime job.




References

“Evaluating Web Resources,” (n.d.). CRAAP. http://libguides.library.ncat.edu/content.php?pid=53820&sid=394505
“Module 3: Evaluating Information.”
Nesterak, E. (2014). Coerced to confess. The Psych Report. 21 Oct, 2014. http://thepsychreport.com/conversations/coerced-to-confess-the-psychology-of-false-confessions/