Abstract
Reliable and valid measurement of trust in science and scientists is important. Assessing levels of such trust is important in determining attitudes and predicting behaviours in response to medical and scientific interventions targeted at managing public crises. However, trust is a complex phenomenon that has to be understood in relation to both distrust and mistrust. The Trust in Science and Scientists Scale has been adopted with increasing frequency in large-scale public health research. Detailed psychometric evaluation of the scale is overdue and makes meaningful comparisons between studies that use the scale difficult. Here, we examine the scale’s dimensionality across five separate samples. We find that two factors emerge that are divided by their item polarity. Implications for scale use and trust in science measurement are discussed.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 231228 |
Journal | Royal Society Open Science |
Volume | 11 |
Issue number | 4 |
Early online date | 17 Apr 2024 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 30 Apr 2024 |
Data Availability Statement
Data and code are available online at OSF [110]. Included are subsets of each dataset containing the items from the TISS, as well as data files prepared for Mplus analyses and correlation matrices for each dataset. Permission was granted from the authors to provide these item data here for transparency and reproducibility. Full datasets for Breakwell et al. [51], Jaspal et al. [49] and Nadelson et al. [22] are not provided. For Agley et al., full datasets can be freely accessed at [45].Electronic supplementary material is available online [111].
Keywords
- mistrust
- psychometrics
- risk
- science
- trust
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General