Evidence Characteristics

Evidence characteristics are the criteria on which your evidence will be analysed. You set and define these characteristics when you create a new board. These characteristics help you evaluate the relevance and quality of your evidence. There are two classes of evidence characteristics: Content Characteristics and Quality Characteristics.

Content characteristics

Content characteristics tell you what kind of information is in the article and how strongly or poorly that information supports your hypothesis. When analysing data, board members will rate on a scale of one to five the degree to which the evidence meets the specified standards. Content characteristics can include characteristics such as ‘Statistics presented’, ‘Sample Size’. 

You rate each Content characteristic of the evidence with the category in mind. For example, if you give a 5/5 rating for a characteristic called 'Statistics', you are indicating that the 'Statistics' in the evidence very strongly support the claim made in the category.

Quality characteristics

Quality characteristics help you assess the quality of the evidence in its own right. Like content characteristics, source characteristics will be rated on a scale of one to five. 

Evidence characteristic weights

Both types of evidence characteristics are assigned weights during the board creation process. These weights are used to signal the importance of each evidence characteristic you include. The higher the weight, the more important that characteristic is. The weights are also used to calculate the evidence ratings.