Measuring Trust and its Variance during the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Serial Surveys and Quantitative Text Analysis

我们提议开展一项雄心勃勃的跨国和跨学科研究，以了解信任在公众支持和遵守政府COVID-19政策方面发挥的关键作用。政策的成功取决于公众的支持，而公众的支持又取决于信任。信任是一个多维度的概念——主题上包括能力、仁慈、公平、公开、信誉、信心、可靠和正直（Gefen, 2002）——不同学术领域的侧重点有重要的不同。重要的是，我们提出的研究通过得出缺乏信任意味着什么，特别关注不信任和不信任之间的关键差异，扩展了目前的研究水平（Jennings et al. 2021）。为了更好地了解大流行管理，并通过政策合规加快恢复，进而提高新冠肺炎后的政策效率，我们需要了解信任。基于50多年来关于信任组成部分和更具体的政治信任的社会科学文献（例如Levi和Stoker 2000），我们还将研究年龄、性别、种族、阶级、教育程度、地点、职业、移民身份、COVID-19生活经历、媒体使用和政治立场等多重因素如何影响对政府COVID-19应对措施和措施的各个方面的信任，使用超过24个月的调查和社交媒体数据。我们的研究解释了人们信任的差异，以及群体之间和群体内部的信任差异，将有助于识别不那么顺从的群体，在这些群体中，需要更多的理解和完善的沟通。我们的研究结果将为人们对政治机构或医疗当局的不信任如何降低他们遵守不同政策措施的意愿提供清晰的解释。不信任导致对信息的仔细审查，包括信息的呈现方式和呈现信息的人（Devine et al. 2020; Jennings et al. 2021）。随着公民接收和使用新信息，对政府COVID-19政策的态度也会发生更快的变化。我们的项目将延伸现有的关于COVID-19和信任的工作，进一步解释上述信任的各个维度如何结合起来解释人们愿意或拒绝遵守任何特定的政策应对措施。通过使用纵向调查跟踪和测量人们的信任和遵守意愿，该项目将提供信任如何随时间变化的详细说明。通过进行有针对性的媒体内容分析，它将允许一些研究问题直接使用二手数据来回答，并提供一个基线进行比较，提供一个深入的探索，以确定导致不信任的具体原因。总之，这种混合方法有助于数据三角测量并验证研究结果，从而更深入地了解日本和英国的信任差异。通过纳入多个信任维度、多个信任发送者（国家、地方政府机构和卫生当局）以及多个结果变量，我们的研究结果将有助于确定不信任和不信任影响（不）遵守的不同方式。我们的项目利用了日本和英国学者的综合专业知识，有效地衡量了日本（集体）和英国（个人）不同文化背景下的信任，并展示了信任与政策合规和政府支持相关的具体方式，这是帮助日本和英国政府有效实施COVID-19退出战略和建立有弹性和可持续的大流行后社会的关键知识。

We propose an ambitious cross-national and inter-disciplinary study to understand the critical role that trust plays in public support and compliance with governmental COVID-19 policies. Policy success depends on the public's buy-in, which depends on trust. Trust is a multidimensional concept - thematically including competence, benevolence, fairness, openness, credibility, confidence, reliability and integrity (Gefen, 2002) - with important differing points of emphasis across academic fields. Importantly, our proposed research extends the state of the art by drawing out differences in what a lack of trust means, focusing in particular on key differences between mistrust and distrust (Jennings et al. 2021). 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. Building on over fifty years of social science literature on components of trust in general and political trust more specifically (e.g. Levi and Stoker 2000), we will also investigate how multiple factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, class, education, location, occupation, migration status, lived COVID-19 experience, media usage, and political stance affect the various dimensions of trust towards governmental COVID-19 responses and measures, using surveys and social media data over 24 months.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. Mistrust leads to careful scrutiny of information, in terms of how it is presented, and who presents the information (Devine et al. 2020; Jennings et al. 2021). It also leads itself to more rapid attitudinal change towards government COVID-19 policies as citizens receive and use new information. Extending the existing work on COVID-19 and trust, our project will provide further explanation on how the various dimensions of trust mentioned above combine to explain people's willingness or refusal to comply with any specific policy response. 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 regarding the variance of trust in Japan and the UK.By incorporating multiple trust dimensions, multiple trust senders (national, local government institutions and health authorities), as well as multiple outcome variables, our research findings will help identify the separate ways that mistrust and distrust affect (non)compliance. Our project utilises the combined expertise of academics based in both Japan and the UK to validly measure trust in the differing cultural contexts of Japan (collective) and UK (individualistic) and demonstrate the specific ways in which trust is associated with policy compliance and government support, which is critical knowledge in helping both the Japanese and British governments effectively implement COVID-19 exit strategies and build resilient and sustainable post-pandemic societies.