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.

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…