Assessing Credibility * When you assess the credibility of a document, you assess how much it can be believed.
§ The criteria you can use to assess the credibility of a document are usually remembered by using the acronym RAVEN:
R – reputation
A – ability to see / perceive / hear / feel / smell / taste
V – vested interest to tell the truth or vested interest to lie
E – expertise or experience
N – neutrality (or its opposite, “bias”)
§ Reputation – Reputation is what other people think of the author of the document or a person or organisation mentioned in the document. You can judge reputation from knowledge of their past performance. Have they lied or been misleading? Do they have a strong reputation for telling the truth? The reputation criterion uses the idea that a highly credible reputation in the past suggests there will be high credibility in the future.
§ Ability to see / perceive / hear – Was the author or person in the document an eye-witness of the dispute? Were they at the event? Were there any factors impeding their reliability such as lack of concentration, fog etc? Ability to see is the most useful of the senses but ability to perceive and ability to hear are useful in some circumstances.
§ Vested interest to tell the truth or vested interest to lie – Vested interest is to do with the author or a person in the document gaining (or not losing) something by telling the truth or lying. It is often helpful to think of vested interest as being to do with money in its widest sense such as a job, customers, a company’s income, ownership of a house etc.
NOTE: Students sometimes confuse reputation and vested interest. Reputation is to do with what other people think of the author/person in the document whereas vested interest is to do with what the author/person in the document will gain or not lose by telling the truth or lying. * Expertise or experience – Does the author/person in the document have skills gained through training which allow them to give informed evidence in the document? In other words, do they have particular knowledge or skill to interpret the incident more accurately than other people? Experience is very similar to expertise and no distinction is made between them by examiners. Experience is more to do with the time spent in relevant situations which implies that expertise has been built up.

* Neutrality or bias – Is the author/person in the document neutral or does he have a motive for being biased? If there is bias, the motive needs to be described.
NOTE: Students very often confuse bias and vested interest to lie. To show bias, you have to show only that the author/person in the document has a motive to lie such as being a member of a particular group or supporting a group or having particular beliefs. To show vested interest, you have to state what the author/person would gain or not lose by lying. * There are three other credibility criteria that are acceptable for commenting on documents:
- Primary source and secondary source - Primary evidence is original. It can include observations made at the time of a dispute such as in a policeman’s notebook, a photograph, a video recording, an audio tape and an eyewitness’s written statement. Secondary evidence has been processed in some way. Primary source evidence has high credibility because it is a record of what was seen or heard.
Secondary source evidence has less credibility because any type of processing might have altered it in some way such as to remove part of it and thus to alter its meaning, emphasis or context.
- Balance and selectivity - Balance exists where the document contains claims and/or evidence from both sides of a dispute. It is equivalent to “neutral”. It is likely to give the document high credibility. Conversely, selectivity is where the document contains claims and/or evidence from only one side of the dispute. It is equivalent to bias and might give the document low credibility.
- Consistency and inconsistency - Consistency is the situation where a document might contain claims or evidence from two different sources which agree. Inconsistency is when a document has two claims or pieces of evidence within it which disagree. However, if the disagreement part is a counter argument, inconsistency cannot be used because counter arguments are used by authors to strengthen their argument.