Incorporating Other Lines of Evidence

Before deciding to treat a line of evidence separately, consideration shonld be given to whether it can in fact be directly incorporated into the quantitative assessment. For example, it may be possible to use Bayesian updating to incorporate information from field studies or monitoring if they provide direct measurements of the assessment endpoint, or of the intermediate model. 

Usually, some lines of evidence will not be suitable for direct incorporation into quantitative analysis. Semiquantitative or qualitative methods will then be needed to weigh the different lines of evidence, including the quantitative assessment, and integrate them for decision making. Methods for assessing weight of evidence were outside the scope of the workshop that developed this book but are discussed by Suter et al. (2000) and were recently the focus of another workshop (Chapman et al. 2002). Whatever method is used for weighing different lines of evidence, it will be important to characterize uncertainties in each line of evidence and show their effect on the overall assessment outcome. 

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Be more effective in gathering and incorporating other lines of evidence. 

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