School of Public Health Sciences, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada.
Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1012 WX, Netherlands.
BMC Public Health. 2023 Oct 17;23(1):2023. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-16974-0.
Trust in government is associated with health behaviours and is an important consideration in population health interventions. While there is a reported decline in public trust in government across OECD countries, the tools used to measure trust are limited in their use for informing action to (re)build trust, and have limitations related to reliability and validity. To address the limitations of existing measures available to track public trust, the aim of the present work was to develop a new measure of trust in government.
Fifty-six qualitative interviews (Aug-Oct 2021; oversampling for equity-deserving populations) were conducted to design a national survey, including factor analyses and validation testing (N = 878; June 1-14th 2022) in Canada.
The measure demonstrated strong internal consistency (α = 0.96) and test validity (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.09, SRMR = 0.03), suggesting that trust in government can be measured as a single underlying construct. It also demonstrated strong criterion validity, as measured by significant (p < 0.0001) associations of scores with vaccine hesitancy, vaccine conspiracy beliefs, COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, trust in public health messaging about COVID-19, and trust in public health advice about COVID-19. We present the Trust in Government Measure (TGM); a 13-item unidimensional measure of trust in Federal government.
This measure can be used within high-income countries, particularly member countries within the OECD already in support of using tools to collect, publish and compare statistics. Our measure should be used by researchers and policy makers to measure trust in government as a key indicator of societal and public health.
政府信任与健康行为有关，是人群健康干预的一个重要考虑因素。尽管经合组织国家报告称公众对政府的信任度有所下降，但用于衡量信任的工具在用于指导（重建）信任方面的使用有限，并且存在与可靠性和有效性相关的局限性。为了解决现有用于跟踪公众信任的工具的局限性，本研究旨在开发一种新的政府信任度衡量工具。
2021 年 8 月至 10 月（代表性抽样，包括权益人群）进行了 56 次定性访谈，以设计一项全国性调查，包括因素分析和验证性测试（2022 年 6 月 1 日至 14 日，N=878）在加拿大进行。
该测量工具具有较强的内部一致性（α=0.96）和测试有效性（CFI=0.96，RMSEA=0.09，SRMR=0.03），表明政府信任可以作为一个单一的潜在结构进行测量。它还具有较强的标准有效性，如与疫苗犹豫、疫苗阴谋信念、COVID-19 阴谋信念、对 COVID-19 公共卫生信息的信任以及对 COVID-19 公共卫生建议的信任的显著（p<0.0001）关联所衡量的那样。我们提出了政府信任度衡量工具（TGM）；这是一个 13 项的联邦政府信任的单一维度衡量工具。
该工具可在高收入国家内使用，特别是经合组织成员国已经支持使用工具收集、发布和比较统计数据。我们的衡量工具应被研究人员和政策制定者用于衡量政府信任度，将其作为社会和公共卫生的关键指标。
