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The current study uses data collected from defendants immediately after their hearings to test hypotheses regarding the relations among constructs relevant to perceptions of the state courts. Takin...

The current research adds to the literature addressing police body-worn cameras (BWCs) by experimentally evaluating their effect on an interaction that has, to date, received relatively little systematic, empirical attention: police–eyewitness interactions. Although research suggests that BWCs generally have positive effects, legal scholars and media professionals have long argued that deploying cameras in this context may backfire, especially by chilling public willingness to speak with police. The current study utilized an online national convenience sample (N = 508) to test the effect of four factors that were varied across seven mock interview video conditions on participants’ willingness to cooperate, the amount of information provided, accuracy and confidence in an eyewitness identification task, and perceptions like procedural fairness and trust. We hypothesized that the presence and activation of the camera would have positive effects on the interaction. Regarding the factors, the manipulated presence of a recording camera had the most consistent positive impact. Whether the camera was present, and the participant’s awareness of the camera and the fact that it was recording were also tested, but these comparisons were less likely to reach statistical significance. Regarding the conditions, the best outcomes were associated with officers who turned on the camera and did not explain why. Conversely, the worst outcomes were associated with officers who turned off the cameras without explanation. Our results suggest that the positive effects of BWCs may extend to police–eyewitness interactions and reveal no evidence of a chilling effect on eyewitness-relevant outcomes.

The recent protests regarding the state of policing in the United States clearly demonstrate that how the police do their job creates a salient potential for harm to the public. This study applies a multidimensional paradigm of risk perception to quantify evaluations of police-caused harm. Using data from a national (U.S.) convenience sample ( n = 1,890) that oversampled individuals who self-identified as black or Muslim, we tested whether these evaluations vary systematically (using confidence intervals), whether they covary with police legitimacy (using structural equation modeling), and the extent to which that covariance differs by demographic status (using multiple groups structural equation modeling). Our results suggest that black and Muslim individuals evaluate police-caused harm differently than do majority group members (white and Christian) on most, but not all, of the measured dimensions. We also find that those evaluations are predictive of trust and provide evidence of some level of consistency across communities.

Positive public perceptions are a critical pillar of the criminal justice system, but the literature addressing them often fails to offer clear advice regarding the important constructs or the relationships among them. The research reported here sought to take an important step toward this clarity by recruiting a national convenience sample to complete an online survey about the police in the respondent’s community, which included measures of the process-based model of legitimacy and the classic model of trust. Our results suggest that although both are predictive, the models can be integrated in a way that allows the strengths of each model to address the weaknesses of the other. We therefore present this model as a first step toward an Integrated Framework of Police Legitimacy that can meaningfully incorporate much of the existing scholarship and provide clearer guidance for those who seek to address these constructs in research and practice.

Based on the survey of 495 police officers from the Croatian capital of Zagreb, this chapter explores the relation between organizational justice and police integrity. Grounded in the theory of police integrity and the related methodology developed by Klockars and colleagues, our study incorporates a number of hypothetical scenarios, ranging from police corruption and use of excessive force, to organizational deviance and interpersonal deviance. Bivariate analyses show that, for the overwhelming majority of scenarios included in the questionnaire, the police officers’ evaluations of procedural, distributive, and interactional justice are strongly related to the their evaluations of misconduct seriousness. In subsequent logistic regression models that control for demographic factors (e.g., length of service, supervisory position) and organizational factors (e.g., knowledge of official rules, severity of expected discipline), we find that evaluations of organizational justice are strong predictors of the respondents’ seriousness evaluations in about two-thirds of the scenarios. Our findings also demonstrate that relative evaluations of seriousness (i.e., how serious each scenario is evaluated compared to the other scenarios in the questionnaire) are not related to the police officers’ perceptions of organizational justice.

This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland–Saginaw–Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results indicated that although some participants were not concerned with living in a contaminated community, local residents largely perceived dioxin as a risk to individual health and the local environment. Concern, shock, and irritation were typical affective responses at the time participants learned of the contamination. Several participants indicated a feeling of embarrassment and fear of being rejected by others because of the stigma associated with industrial contamination. Instead of actively seeking information about dioxin contamination and remediation, participants often relied on information provided to them by government officials. Behaviorally, participants avoided eating locally caught fish and prepared fish more carefully in order to avoid exposure to contaminants. As a whole, this study provided insight to understand affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses to environmental stigma.

Contemporary natural resource management (NRM) emphasises the role of the public in general and land owners in particular as voluntary participants in the process. Understanding the role of trust in voluntary cooperation is therefore critical, but the current state of the relevant literature is such that it fails to systematically address a few important issues. This inquiry sought to address these issues by presenting and testing a model of land owners’ trust in and cooperation with a NRM institution. The model hypothesises that the six major drivers of trust in this context (dispositional trust, care, competence, confidence, procedural fairness and salient values similarity) are distinct but correlated constructs that drive cooperation and whose effects are moderated by the sophistication (relevant knowledge and experience) of the trustor. The results provide complicated partial support for the hypotheses and suggest that (1) although the six constructs are separable, their effects on cooperation are no...

Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trust in nine organizations whose efforts are relevant to dioxin contamination in Michigan's Saginaw Bay Watershed, risk perceptions, and self-reports of risky behavior (i.e., consumption of local fish identified as especially likely to contain contaminants). As hypothesized (H1), the negative effect of trust in two agencies-the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) and a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services-sponsored River Walker Program (RWP)-on risky behavior was significantly mediated by risk perception but these effects differed from each other such that trust in the MDNR was associated with increased perceptions of risk while trust in the RWP was associated with decreased perceptions of benefit. Also as hypothesized (H2), the positive effect of trust in Dow Chemical Company on risky behavior was significantly mediated by risk perception such that increased trust in Dow was associated with reduced risk perception. The current results lend credence to arguments regarding the importance of specificity in the target of trust and advance this literature by suggesting that differential effects on risk perception help explain this variability. Thus, organizations whose efforts focus on risk communication appear ideally situated to reduce risky behavior through a negative impact on risk perception. Other organizations, however, may run the risk of increasing risky behavior if their efforts result in reduced perceptions of risk.

This study examined a knowledge-centered theory of institutional trust development. In the context of trust in water regulatory institutions, the moderating impact of knowledge was tested to determine if there were longitudinal changes in the bases of institutional trust as a function of increases in knowledge about a target institution. We hypothesized that as people learn about an institution with which they were previously unfamiliar, they begin to form more nuanced perceptions, distinguishing the new institution from other institutions and relying less upon their generalized trust to estimate their trust in that institution. Prior to having specific, differential information about a new institution, we expected institutional trust to be a function of generalized trust variables such as dispositional trust and trust in government. The longitudinal experiment involved 185 college students randomly assigned to one of three information conditions. Every 3 months for 15 months, participants read information about water regulatory institutions or a control institution. At each time point, participants reported their trust in and perceptions of the trust- and distrust-worthiness of the water regulatory institutions. Participants also completed measures of knowledge of water regulatory institutions, dispositional trust, and governmental trust. Our manipulation check indicated that, as expected, those in the experimental group increased in subjective knowledge of water regulatory institutions to a greater extent than those in the control condition. Consistent with our hypotheses, there was some evidence that, compared to the control group, the experimental group relied less on their general trust in government as a basis for their trust in water regulatory institutions. However, contrary to our hypotheses, there was no evidence the experimental group relied less on dispositional trust as a basis for institutional trust. There also was some evidence the experimental group's trust in water regulatory institutions was less affected by fluctuations of trustworthiness (but not distrustworthiness) perceptions over time. This suggests that knowledge results in the development of more stable institutional trust attitudes, but that trustworthiness and distrustworthiness perceptions may operate somewhat differently when impacting trust in specific institutions.

While the story of the Flint water crisis has frequently been told, even sympathetic analyses have largely worked to make invisible the significant actions of Flint residents to protect and advocate for their community. Leaving the voices of these stakeholders out of narratives about the crisis has served to deepen distrust in the community. Our project responds to these silences through a community-driven research study aimed explicitly at elevating the frame of Flint residents in and around the Flint water crisis. This paper describes the coming together of the research team, the overall project design for each of the three research efforts, and lessons learned. The three sub-projects include: (1) a qualitative analysis of community sentiment provided during 17 recorded legislative, media, and community events, (2) an analysis of trust in the Flint community through nine focus groups across demographic groups (African American, Hispanic, seniors, and youth) of residents in Flint, and (3) an analysis of the role of the faith-based community in response to public health crises through two focus groups with faith based leaders from Flint involved with response efforts to the water crisis. Our study offers insight for understanding trust in crisis, which could be valuable to other communities and researchers seeking to address similar situations. The project offers community science as a model for considering community engagement in research as part of the process of resilience.

Although researchers have consistently demonstrated the importance of confidence in public institutions like the courts, relatively little attention has been paid to understanding what confidence itself really is. This article presents data from two samples of community members, thereby building on and extending a preliminary investigation that sought to understand constructs related to confidence in state courts with student samples. Structural equation modelling results provide support for the dimensionality of the measures and indicate that dispositional trust has little to no independent effect on confidence. However, tendency to trust in governmental institutions, cynicism toward the law and felt obligation to obey the law are important predictive constructs. The current results are important both for researchers seeking to understand confidence in the courts and the judges and administrators who would seek to increase it.

Clarifying the “conceptual morass” of the social science of trust is a critical endeavor, and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is an important tool for researchers seeking to investigate the relationships among and relative influence of the many trust constructs in this expanding literature. Problematically, however, the often conceptually overlapping nature of the constructs themselves can create covariance problems that are only exacerbated by SEM’s ability to partition shared and unshared variance among indicators. These challenges can, in some situations, entirely preclude researchers from using SEM to test theoretically important hypotheses. There are a number of potential strategies available to researchers to address these problems, notably including both item- and factor-level aggregation techniques. Importantly, however, these aggregation strategies often compromise many of the benefits that make SEM so attractive in the first place. We therefore recommend that researchers with strongly correlated latent constructs test a specific alternative model in which higher-order factors are used to predict the covariance among the latent factors. These models address the problems that arise from working with excessive covariance while preserving the conceptual and statistical distinctiveness of the lower-order factors and permitting researchers to test their independent influence on important outcomes. To aid in illustrating this approach, the chapter includes a real-world data example in which various alternative model specifications are tested, highlighting the utility of higher-order factor models for trust researchers.

PurposeMunicipalities commonly ask the public to give input by answering questions about their preferences. There is some belief that input enhances the public's confidence in government. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether different types of input activities (obtained by phone or online surveys, or via face‐to‐face engagements) differentially impact confidence.Design/methodology/approachData were collected over two years from different input activities undertaken to inform a city's budgeting and performance measures' determinations.FindingsSignificant amounts of variance in the public's confidence in municipal governments are accounted for by independent predictors such as current satisfaction, perceived trustworthiness, legitimacy, and loyalty to the institution. Compared to online and phone surveys, face‐to‐face input methods seem to have a particularly strong, positive relationship with the public's perceptions of the trustworthiness (e.g. competence, integrity, benevolence) of municipal government officials. Persons who participate in face‐to‐face, online, or phone events differ both in extent of confidence and, to a small extent, in the bases of their confidence.Research limitations/implicationsThe study design is correlational rather than experimental and data were not originally gathered to test the identified hypotheses. In addition, it is not prudent to put too much stock in results from only one jurisdiction that relied primarily on convenience samples.Originality/valueIn instances in which enhancing confidence in the institution is a specific objective of public input, this work provides researchers and practitioners with guidance to better anticipate which input technique(s) works best and why.

The purpose of this article is to test whether the use of public participation by a local government increases perceptions of procedural fairness among the public and to propose an explanation for why fairness is a strong predictor of satisfaction with governmental decisions. To do this, we draw on the uncertainty management model to hypothesize that indications of procedural fairness can increase public support for government and its decisions and that fairness effects are greater for individuals who are more uncertain (less knowledgeable) about the governmental body in question. To test the hypothesis, we embedded an experiment in a survey of the public that was used by a local government to inform its budgetary decisions. The results provide support for the notion that governmental use of public input does increase perceptions of governmental fairness and that, in turn, perceptions of fairness have stronger relationships with overall governmental assessments for those who are relatively uncertain about a governmental institution.

Natural resources management in the United States is a complicated endeavor and, although a variety of institutions are involved, most day to day management falls to state natural resource authorities. Given the large percentage of private land in some states and the often opposing interests of the parties, these authorities’ efforts often put them in conflict with land owners. Navigating these conflicts well is important for the effective and efficient management of natural resources in the US and the current paper applies the social science of procedural fairness to identify three critical concerns that should be attended to in these conflicts: (1) the reason for the importance of perceived procedural fairness lies in its ability to signal that the individual is valued in the process, (2) voice in the process and the ability to influence the decision are critical components of perceived procedural fairness in this context, (3) the perception of procedural fairness will be most important in the face of uncertainty.

"Regulating water resources is a critically important yet increasingly complex component of the interaction between ecology and society. Many argue that effective water regulation relies heavily upon the compliance of water users. The relevant literature suggests that, rather than relying on external motivators for individual compliance, e.g., punishments and rewards, it is preferable to focus on internal motivators, including trust in others. Although prior scholarship has resulted in contemporary institutional efforts to increase public trust, these efforts are hindered by a lack of evidence regarding the specific situations in which trust, in its various forms, most effectively increases compliance. We report the results of an experiment designed to compare the impacts of three trust-related constructs, a broad sense of trust in the institution, specific process-fairness perceptions, and a dispositional tendency to trust others, on compliance with water regulation under experimentally varied situations. Specifically, we tested the potential moderating influences of concepts relevant to water regulation in the real world: high versus low information conditions about an institutional decision, decision consistency with relevant data, and decision outcome valence. Our results suggest that participants??? dispositional trust predicts their intent to comply when they have limited information about decisions, but the effects of dispositional trust are mediated by trust in the institution. Institutional trust predicts compliance under narrow conditions: when information is lacking or when decision outcomes are positive and are justified by available data. Finally, when the regulatory decision is inconsistent with other data in high-information conditions, prior judgments of institutional process fairness are most predictive of intent to comply. Our results may give guidance to water regulators, who may want to try to increase trust and thus increase voluntary compliance; the results suggest, in particular, that such efforts be tailored to the situation."

Despite its contemporary and theoretical importance in numerous social scientific disciplines, institutional confidence research is limited by a lack of consensus regarding the distinctions and relationships among related constructs (e.g., trust, confidence, legitimacy, distrust, etc.). This study examined four confidence-related constructs that have been used in studies of trust/confidence in the courts: dispositional trust, trust in institutions, obligation to obey the law, and cynicism. First, the separability of the four constructs was examined by exploratory factor analyses. Relationships among the constructs were also assessed. Next, multiple regression analyses were used to explore each construct's independent contribution to confidence in the courts. Finally, a second study replicated the first study and also examined the stability of the institutional confidence constructs over time. Results supported the hypothesized separability of, and correlations among, the four confidence-related constructs. The extent to which the constructs independently explained the observed variance in confidence in the courts differed as a function of the specific operationalization of confidence in the courts and the individual predictor measures. Implications for measuring institutional confidence and future research directions are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.