Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sarah Alkejek
Athena Montiel
Vanessa Rangel
The 3-4 evaluation categories that the group chose were authorship, bias, currency, and
relevance. Authorship is important because it gives credit to the authors who made contributions
to the article and presents their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is
published. Bias is also considered an important category because identifying bias is essential to
quality research. The content of the article was based upon facts and research rather than
opinions and examined issues using multiple perspectives. Currency is another important factor
only when the topic requires availability for recent information. The references from the article
were scholarly and were mostly recent; however, one reference was more than ten years old, but
was probably used due to its historical value. Last but not least, it is necessary to determine
relevance when evaluating the article. The information discussed in the article has to support the
topic directly, so it can be useful for the audience.
The overall quality of the document is rated as excellent from a scale of excellent-poor
based on the categories and descriptions displayed in the professional source evaluation matrix.
As a group, we evaluated the document by providing scores that reflected our judgment for each
category. The majority of the categories had an excellent score, including authorship, publisher,
writing, bias, and relevance.
There is not a difference between our rankings. This is probably due to the fact that when
we read the article we were actually looking at the different important components that help
create a good article, such as hypothesis, methods, statistics, limitations, and so on. Basically, we
applied the skills we learned during journal club instinctively. In question five, we looked at our
scores and noticed that we evaluated the articles by these items unknowingly before. For
example, bias was a category we chose to score and that is actually goes under limitations, which
we looked at previously. The same goes for currency and relevance. We probably instinctively
looked at these because in our journal club, we had read some articles that used old data and had
Alkejek, Montiel, and Rangel 2
little to no relevancy. However, the only new item was authorship and even then, it still had a
good score. Therefore, our scores are the same due to this.
3= 2 = good 1= 0 = poor
excellent average
Sarah Alkejek
Athena Montiel
Vanessa Rangel
Categories and descriptions Scores
3= 2 = good 1 = average 0=
excellent poor
The article The Return of American Hunger was assessed from a health professional
perspective as medium quality. The articles message that average Americans are struggling with
food insecurity and that the government isnt addressing the issue or creating policies to help the
struggling American families is clear and easy to understand. Additionally, we are able to
recognize bias, limitations of policies in order to serve a larger population, and the process of
creating new policies or programs that target food insecure populations. The degree of health
literacy we have as health professionals helps us analyze the article and its components.
Alkejek, Montiel, and Rangel 7
The three evaluation categories we chose to be most important and relevant to the article
are writing, bias, and relevance. Writing is the most important evaluation category in regards to a
lay article because the writing style and language used will determine to what degree the lay
audience understands the information presented and will likely impact whether the person will
read the whole article. Bias is an important evaluation factor because a lay article is usually
familiarizing or briefing a topic to the general audience so introducing bias limits the information
the general population receives. Relevance of information is an important evaluation category
because the general population will likely read about information that is relevant or a concern to
them or their community.
Based on the writing, bias introduced, and relevance of the information presented the
article is low-medium quality for a lay individual. The article presents information that is very
relevant to the average American and they would likely be able to read. However, some of the
writing does include words or phrases like post-recession, wage-growth, reimposition, and
excise that the average American may not understand. Additionally, the author presents a
problem of food insecurity with no real solution which an average American might find useful.
In terms of bias, the author details the issue of food insecurity and how the government is not
adequately serving its people which may further impact the general population's view on
government.
The rankings of the article were identified relatively similar as medium and low-medium
quality. When reading an article perspective and prior knowledge play a critical role in how we
analyze and critique the article. From a lay individuals perspective, the article may raise
awareness however the article needs to be well written so it is easy for an average person to
understand and refrain from introducing bias. Overall it is important to keep your target audience
in mind when writing an article and the different factors that may affect how the reader perceives
the information.
The evaluation categories are completely different for the lay article and professional
source because they are intended for two different populations and will be critiqued and analyzed
based on various different factors. While a health professional may have prior knowledge and the
skill to conduct further research an average person may consider one article a good source of
information.