What People Mean by 'Trust' in Media Doesn't Match What Researchers Measure
A new study of 97 interviews reveals a fundamental mismatch: when asked about media trust, audiences express identity and emotion rather than rational evaluation of accuracy or credibility. The finding undermines years of survey-based trust research and suggests the media industry's understanding of audience skepticism may be built on flawed data.
Originaltitel: What Do Media Audiences Mean When They Talk About Media Trust? An Open-ended Approach to How Audiences Interpret the “Trust-question”
<p>While studies of media trust that rely on survey data and statistical analysis give us valuable information, there is some uncertainty about what exactly is being measured with these study designs. There is a need for more inductive and qualitative studies that can help us develop our understanding of the concept and phenomena of trust as such. In this article, we present an analysis of a qualitative interview study (N = 97) with open-ended questions of trust. The results suggest that, although there are many ways to interpret this question, only some lead people to evaluate what researchers usually associate with media trust. Instead, informants saw trust as an “impossible” question; they saw it as an opportunity to communicate a standpoint express identity and emotion or casts the trust-question as an issue of knowledge and rationality. We consider that the results from this study illustrate some of the difficulties that need to be overcome in order to advance the research on media trust.</p>