Measuring trust during the COVID-19 pandemic

We seek to understand the critical role that trust plays in public support and compliance with government COVID-19 policies.

In order to not only better understand pandemic management, but also to speed up recovery through policy compliance, and additionally to improve policy efficiency post-COVID-19, we need to understand trust.

Explaining the variance in people’s trust and how trust differs between and within population groups, our research will help identify the less compliant groups, where more understanding and refined communications are required.

Our research findings will provide clear explanations of how people’s distrust of political institutions or medical authorities reduces their willingness to comply with different policy measures. By tracking and measuring people’s trust and willingness to comply using longitudinal surveys, this project will provide a detailed account of how trust varies over time. By conducting targeted media content analysis, it will allow some of the research questions to be answered directly using secondary data and provide a baseline for comparison, offering an in-depth exploration to identify specific reasons leading to distrust.

Together, this mixed method approach aids data triangulation and validates the research findings, providing a more in-depth understanding of the variance of trust in Japan and the UK.

We will investigate how multiple factors affect the various dimensions of trust towards governmental COVID-19 responses and measures. These include: age gender ethnicity class education location occupation migration status lived COVID-19 experience media usage political stance. 

Publications

• Britain's energy price cap left many people confused – especially Conservative voters