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Trust, mistrust and distrust: a gendered perspective on meanings and measurements

Trust, mistrust and distrust: a gendered perspective on meanings and measurements
Trust, mistrust and distrust: a gendered perspective on meanings and measurements
Recent work has emphasised the need for greater nuance in qualifying both the presence and absence of political trust in different political systems. The concept of trust may thus be more effectively perceived and analysed as a family with trust, mistrust, and distrust as its members. Expanding to a family of trust means that new ways of capturing these attitudes in empirical survey work may be needed and a way of critically driving that exploration is to investigate how gender influences how they are understood. In this paper, we use insights from focus group discussions on a series of newly designed trust, mistrust and distrust questions to identify: 1) how citizens perceive these different concepts and 2) how gendered these perceptions are. We then draw on new survey data gathered through the TrustGov project to test how the focus group findings impact survey responses and thus identify: 3) which survey questions are more likely to effectively measure the three concepts. We show that the differences highlighted in our qualitative work underscore the need to develop a more systematic mixed methods research agenda on both the expanded family of political trust and gender. We emphasise that global comparative work to capture diverse gender effects across different political systems are the necessary next steps for the field.
2673-3145
Bunting, Hannah
bd634648-89b8-48cc-8911-a5989d2db97a
Gaskell, Jennifer
9653ac56-1d66-4d76-93dc-8064edbe5f99
Stoker, Gerard
209ba619-6a65-4bc1-9235-cba0d826bfd9
Bunting, Hannah
bd634648-89b8-48cc-8911-a5989d2db97a
Gaskell, Jennifer
9653ac56-1d66-4d76-93dc-8064edbe5f99
Stoker, Gerard
209ba619-6a65-4bc1-9235-cba0d826bfd9

Bunting, Hannah, Gaskell, Jennifer and Stoker, Gerard (2021) Trust, mistrust and distrust: a gendered perspective on meanings and measurements. Frontiers in Political Science, 3. (doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.642129).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Recent work has emphasised the need for greater nuance in qualifying both the presence and absence of political trust in different political systems. The concept of trust may thus be more effectively perceived and analysed as a family with trust, mistrust, and distrust as its members. Expanding to a family of trust means that new ways of capturing these attitudes in empirical survey work may be needed and a way of critically driving that exploration is to investigate how gender influences how they are understood. In this paper, we use insights from focus group discussions on a series of newly designed trust, mistrust and distrust questions to identify: 1) how citizens perceive these different concepts and 2) how gendered these perceptions are. We then draw on new survey data gathered through the TrustGov project to test how the focus group findings impact survey responses and thus identify: 3) which survey questions are more likely to effectively measure the three concepts. We show that the differences highlighted in our qualitative work underscore the need to develop a more systematic mixed methods research agenda on both the expanded family of political trust and gender. We emphasise that global comparative work to capture diverse gender effects across different political systems are the necessary next steps for the field.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 22 June 2021
e-pub ahead of print date: 6 July 2021
Published date: 6 July 2021

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 450449
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/450449
ISSN: 2673-3145
PURE UUID: 7eeac21c-2fbf-4495-bced-fa15e4b58332
ORCID for Jennifer Gaskell: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-1702-6234
ORCID for Gerard Stoker: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-8172-3395

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 28 Jul 2021 16:31
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:52

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Contributors

Author: Hannah Bunting
Author: Gerard Stoker ORCID iD

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