Keywords: survey attitudes, social trust, institutional trust

A growing body of research has begun to theorize and provide empirical evidence for declining willingness to participate in survey research. Reduced engagement with surveys is strongly related not only with individual-level factors, such as negative attitudes toward surveys (de Leeuw et al., 2019), but also larger societal processes, such as declining trust in institutions and science in general (Silber et al., 2022). Because scholars know less about how these two forces – trust and attitudes toward surveys – are related to each other, this study takes a closer look at the various dimensions of these two concepts. Specifically, with respect to trust, we explore how it plays out in both (1) institutional and (2) social domains, traditionally operationalized, respectively, as trust in politics or science and trust in others. Regarding attitudes toward surveys, we examine three key dimensions of survey attitudes: (1) individuals’ perceptions of the value surveys play in society; (2) their enjoyment in participating in surveys; and (3) the extent to which they perceive engagement with surveys to be a burden.
In general, because institutional trust engenders a belief that the system and those in power are responsive to individual and societal interests (Miller, 1974), we expect that it will be positively associated most strongly with perceptions that surveys are a valuable democratic tool. However, because social trust is grounded in both views of the generalized other as well as those in one’s immediate lifespace (Coleman, 1990), we anticipate that it is most closely tied to perceptions of surveys as enjoyable (or less burdensome).
To test these expectations, we analyze data collected in the second round of the Cross-National Online Survey (CRONOS-2) conducted across 12 countries between 2021 and 2023 in the framework of the European Social Survey (ESS). We report the development of multi-item measures of each indicator, followed by an assessment of their association and the development of a path model that provides insights into the varying levels of trust vs. perceptions of surveys. While these results constitute the crux of our analyses, we also explore differences across countries and individual-level characteristics (e.g., a person’s political ideology). Overall, the research aims to deepen the understanding of the interrelationships between trust and perceptions of surveys. We hope these findings will illuminate ways in which surveys can be promoted as a scientific method to measure public opinion.