Measuring the trust in the European values study and the European social survey

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the latent construct measurement of political and interpersonal trust in two researches: the European Values Study and the European Social Survey. The main goal was to estimate the validity of measuring the respective concepts. In order to achieve this goal, we conducted a number of Principal Component Analyses and Confirmatory Factor Analyses. Additionally, we used multilevel regression modelling to test and compare the effect of socio-demographic variables on political and interpersonal trust in both researches. We identified that socio-demographic predictors had a similar effect on both types of trust. The paper is complemented with descriptive data that portray the differences among countries when it comes to interpersonal and political trust.