Social and institutional trust

Social trust was operationalised by asking respondents: ‘Do you believe most people can be trusted in general or do you believe one can never be too careful when dealing with other people?’. The answer categories were: ‘can be trusted’ and ‘one can never be too careful’.
Institutional trust concerns trust in a number of political and civil society institutes, institutions and organisations.
Institutional trust was operationalised by asking respondents: ‘Following are a number of questions about your level of trust in various organisations and how they perform. Please indicate for each type of institution how much you trust them: churches, the military, the legal system, the press, the police, the House of Representatives, civil servants, banks, large companies, the European Union.’ The answer categories were: ‘a great deal’, ‘a fair amount’, ‘not much‘ and ‘not at all’. The categories ‘a great deal’ and ‘a fair amount’ were then aggregated, as was done with ‘not much‘ and ‘not at all’. The findings are based on the large-scale survey ‘Social Cohesion and Well-being’ which was conducted over the period 2012-2018 among nearly 54 thousand persons aged 15 years and up.

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