Creating Surveys to Measure Institutional Trust: A Best Practice Guide

Abstract

This guide is written for practitioners, researchers, and policy teams who want to design a short survey module (or a full questionnaire) to measure trust in institutions such as government agencies, regulators, the media, banks, courts, health services, or science. It focuses on the practical decisions that most affect data quality: defining the trust object, writing unambiguous items, choosing response options, and testing questions before fielding.

It draws on common issues identified in the trust-survey literature and on methodological evidence from survey design research, including experimental comparisons of alternative wordings and formats.