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• Certain issues of reliability and validity in the case of generalized trust survey measurement in light of the Hungarian data

  5-22

  Akos Bodor

  Mark Hegedus

  Views:

  87

  Trust is a field of research in social sciences that has complex, well-developed theoretical
  approaches, but its empirical tools are less precisely grounded. The most common survey tool
  for measuring generalized trust is a formula often referred to in the literature as “standard”
  trust question, which reads as follows: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can
  be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” The aim of the paper is to
  examine this standard survey item along the dimensions of reliability and validity. In our analysis,
  we use Hungarian data obtained from various international surveys. Our results indicate serious
  validity problems, as the standard question shows only weak linkage with additional variables,
  which, based on the conceptual background, should be in a close relationship with trust.
  KEYWORDS: trust, generalized trust, survey methods, reliability, validity

• Reframing of Particular Trust

  5-27

  Zoltán Grünhut

  Views:

  59

  The paper strives to reconsider the theory of particular trust, i.e. one’s trusting feelings towards her/his most intimate relatives, friends, and personal relations. By doing this, at first, the paper sheds light on two distinct interpretations of particular trust in the literature. One of these approaches addresses particular trust as a kind of core disposition of the self, and it describes how one’s trust towards her/his bonding relations establishes the given subject’s generalized trust towards others, in a broad sense, to people as such. The other interpretation argues that particular trust is important for group-level social dynamics. It claims that if members of close-knit and exclusive groups, dominated by particular trust, are interacting only with each other, and avoiding out-group relations, then broader social cooperation and collaboration are constrained, social integration and cohesion are limited, and on macro level there is an unfolding distrust. As it seems, the above-described readings of particular trust are contradictory. The current paper stresses that just one of these interpretations is coherent and consistent – the first one.