Reconstructing the concept of trust and its measurement from cultural perspective

Trust has been one of the topics of interdisciplinary inquiry since its inception. Particularly, a myriad of studies has been conducted in a bid to explore either trust definition and its components or mere national differences in the level of trust. Given the possibility of cultural differences in the conceptualization of trust, the mere national variation may not accurately capture the essence of cultural differences. The present study pursued to reconstruct trust conceptualization and identify its role-derived expectations mainly the collectivistic cultural background and develop a roles-derived scale. To map out the conceptualization of trust and identify essential role-derived expectations, an open-ended questionnaire was carried out on 199 participants drawn from Kenya and Turkey. Building on the results of study 1, study 2 attempted to develop a role-based interpersonal trust scale and test validity and reliability utilizing 627 participants (314Turkey 313 Kenya). Using the MAXQDA statistic analysis, results of the qualitative study, broadly, espoused the idea of trust being conceptualized as a collection of role-derived expectations taken for granted, in addition to the revelation of exclusive components of trust. Employing exploratory factor analysis and Pearson correlation, the results of study 2 indicated that the newly developed scale consists of 5 dimensions with internal consistency ranging from .75 to .86. Besides, the scale demonstrated both divergent and convergent validity.