tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
Health Syst Reform
. 2025 Dec 31;11(1):2457239.
doi: 10.1080/23288604.2025.2457239. Epub 2025 Feb 11. Rethinking Trust and Public Health Compliance: Introducing a Trust Continuum for Policy and Practice
Ashley Fox[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Victoria Y Fan[SUP] 2 3 [/SUP], Heeun Kim[SUP] 1 4 [/SUP], Minah Kang[SUP] 5 [/SUP]
Affiliations
Trust in government has emerged as one of the strongest predictors of national performance in fighting COVID-19. This commentary aims to take stock of the vast literature on trust and compliance with public health measures that has emerged during the pandemic to synthesize policy-relevant recommendations about: 1) How to conceptualize trust; 2) Whether trust is always deserved; and 3) How governments can earn (appropriate levels of) trust. Based on a critical reading of the literature, we develop a framework that conceptualizes trust as falling along a continuum ranging from extreme distrust to blind trust with the ideal point- "informed" or "basic" trust-falling in the mid-point of the continuum. We illustrate the continuum with examples and provide recommendations regarding how governments can build more nuanced disease responses that account for individuals and sub-groups at different rungs on the continuum while (re)building trust. We conclude that trust-building is a long-term project that must continue in non-crisis times.
Keywords: Trust; compliance; global health; vaccine hesitancy.
. 2025 Dec 31;11(1):2457239.
doi: 10.1080/23288604.2025.2457239. Epub 2025 Feb 11. Rethinking Trust and Public Health Compliance: Introducing a Trust Continuum for Policy and Practice
Ashley Fox[SUP] 1 [/SUP], Victoria Y Fan[SUP] 2 3 [/SUP], Heeun Kim[SUP] 1 4 [/SUP], Minah Kang[SUP] 5 [/SUP]
Affiliations
- PMID: 39932484
- DOI: 10.1080/23288604.2025.2457239
Trust in government has emerged as one of the strongest predictors of national performance in fighting COVID-19. This commentary aims to take stock of the vast literature on trust and compliance with public health measures that has emerged during the pandemic to synthesize policy-relevant recommendations about: 1) How to conceptualize trust; 2) Whether trust is always deserved; and 3) How governments can earn (appropriate levels of) trust. Based on a critical reading of the literature, we develop a framework that conceptualizes trust as falling along a continuum ranging from extreme distrust to blind trust with the ideal point- "informed" or "basic" trust-falling in the mid-point of the continuum. We illustrate the continuum with examples and provide recommendations regarding how governments can build more nuanced disease responses that account for individuals and sub-groups at different rungs on the continuum while (re)building trust. We conclude that trust-building is a long-term project that must continue in non-crisis times.
Keywords: Trust; compliance; global health; vaccine hesitancy.