Evaluating Sources of Information

Let’s go back to:

Howell J. C. and Lynch J.P. (2000) “Youth Gangs in Schools” U.S. Department of Justice Juvenile Justice Bulletin August 2000 Office of Justice Programs

Which can be found at: http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/ojjdp/183015.pdf

Exercise 5: Evaluating the reliability of any information source

How do we know that the information on this web-page is reliable and a good source of information to use?

Look for a number of clues:

Clue No.1 The author(s)

The authors of this piece are James C. Howell and James P. Lynch . But who are they and what is their expertise in the area of gangs?

First check the article itself – does it give any biographies of the authors?

Answer 1: Yes, at the end of the report there is a box which includes the information that:

James C. Howell, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Researcher with the National Youth Gang Center, Institute for Intergovernmental Research, Tallahassee, FL. James P. Lynch, Ph.D., is a Professor at American University, School of Public Affairs, Washington, DC.

Clue No. 2 The author(s)’ affiliation

Does information on the authors’ affiliation suggest that these authors’ work is reliable and trustworthy? Give reasons for your answer.

Answer 2: Well, one is employed by the National Youth Gang Center and the other is a university professor. This suggests that each of these authors is probably trustworthy in their own right but as an added bonus they are affiliated to different, yet equally reliable, institutions – so the practitioner and the academic are collaborating together – this suggests a careful and considered approach to the subject matter.

Clue No. 3 The author(s)’ theoretical perspective

Can you suggest what theoretical perspective are they using?

Answer 3: In this report the authors do not state clearly what theoretical perspective they are using – but there are clues

They use government statistics

They use these statistics uncritically

This suggests:

That they are “positivist” in their perspective i.e. that they look to measurement of social actions rather than to interpretation based on other forms of evidence

That they are writing from a “normative” perspective i.e. they do not set out to question the way statistics are collected and why, suggesting that they trust data generated by the government and other official organizations

Clue No. 4 The currency of the information presented

How up-to-date is the information in the article? What does this tell you about the currency of the information presented?

Answer 4: Well the report was published in August 2000 and the References section shows that they refer to work conducted between 1985 and 2000. This suggests that the work was current at the time of publishing, but that it might be getting a bit old now and you could do with some more up-to-date information in case the data has changed in the intervening years.

Exercise 6: Evaluating the reliability of an internet information source

In addition the piece of work we are using has been located on the internet. There are various clues which we can easily find which give us some further information as to the reliability of this internet-based resource.

To do this you should look at the URL for the page which in this case is: http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/ojjdp/183015.pdf

What does this URL tell you about the source you are using?

Answer 5: The URL begins http: this means that it is written in hypertext language especially for the internet

The second part of the URL is www: this means that it is available on the web – which is where we found it

The third part of the URL is ncjrs: this means that the file is located on the ncjs server

The fourth part of the URL is org – this means that the web-page is hosted by an organisation – in this case it is

There is no country code such as .uk or .it (United Kingdom or Italy) after the fourth part – which signals that the site is based in the United States – if the site is based in any other country there will be some code denoting which

The fifth part of the URL is pdffiles; this shows what type of file we are downloading – in this case the file is written using pdf software – in this case it is Acrobat

The sixth part of the URL shows that the file is in a larger folder which has been named ojjdp – which in this case is short for Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

The last, and in this case the seventh, part of the URL is the actual file name which in this case is 183015.pdf

So we know that we have accessed a file named 183015.pdf, which can be found in a folder named ojjdp and that this is a pdf file which is hosted on the server of an organisation based in the US and that this organisation goes by the initials NCJRS.

A little more detective work means finding out who or what is NCJRS – there is no reference to this in the actual document. A Google search revealed that NCJRS is the National Criminal Justice Reference Service and that they describe themselves as “…a federally funded resource offering justice and substance abuse information to support research, policy, and program development worldwide” (Google search on NCJRS conducted 04.08.05).

So we were right – it is a US based organisation. The fact that it is federally funded means that it is a government funded organisation set up “…to support research, policy, and program development” and therefore it is not likely to take a critical stance. However because it is government funded you can be pretty sure that it is a reliable source if information.

You can see from this example that there is a great deal that you can learn about an internet source by interrogating its URL.

Things which signal that a source is unreliable:

Look for a tilde (that is ~). Official organisations often put this before filenames if the file is actually the author’s personal file rather than one which is written in the name of the organisation itself. This might mean that this information source is less reliable because it is the author’s personal view rather than the organisation’s policy or practice.

Get to know what the different codes which denote which body is responsible for the server, for example the most commonly used are:

edu = education – probably a US college or university
ac = academic – probably a UK based university
gov = a UK government site
org = an organisation which is likely to be non-commercial and non-governmental
com = a commercial organisation
co = a company – most likely also with a commercial focus

Depending on your needs any of the first four are likely to be reliable sources of information, the last two may be driven by commercial imperatives so bear this in mind. But carry out further detective work to gauge the reliability or otherwise of the resource.

Exercise 7: Comparing the value of internet sources

Take a look at the following sites. Do some investigative work on these to assess what sort of sites they are, how reliable they might be – and why you think they might not be reliable. We found them all using the keywords Gang and USA or Canada in Google, but as you can see some are more useful than others!

http://blacksheepancestors.com/usa/georgia_houston.shtml

http://www.gocreate.com/Brainline/brains/

http://users.skynet.be/terrorism/html/street.htm

http://www.usembassycanada.gov/content/textonly.asp?section=can_usa&subsection1=security&document=spp_fs_062705

http://iarc.org/~4x1mk/acacia_collected.html

Remember when looking at these articles to also look for:

• the main points each author is making
• how the author supports each of their main points
• whether the logic of the author’s argument holds up to scrutiny
• whether the material presented by each author is relevant to their points
• whether the author is expressing their own opinion
• whether the author cites other scholarly work
• All these checks will help you to decide whether any information source is worth using.