Interpersonal trust and socio-demographic indicators: analysis of World Values Survey data

Abstract

The article focuses on identifying and analyzing links between interpersonal trust indices and socio-demographic indicators based on a sample of adults who participated in the World Values Survey (WVS). The following key issues are addressed: review of definitions and confidence indicators; review of publications devoted to the study of relationship between trust and economic development of countries; statistical analysis of five demographic indices (gender, age, life satisfaction, income level and education) in samples of respondents formed by the criterion of level of interpersonфal trust. The purpose of this study is to characterize the relationship between socio-demographic indicators and indices of interpersonal trust using statistical methods of analysis. The paper considers a sample of 78,632 respondents in 2010-2014 who participated in the World Values Survey. The data is divided into two groups: a cluster of respondents with a high level of interpersonal trust, and one – with a low level of interpersonal trust. The hypothesis, that the average values of socio-demographic indicators in both clusters are the same, was tested. Using a statistical analysis of the sample, which consists of 78,632 respondents in the period during 2010 through 2014, the hypothesis was rejected for the following indicators: "age", "education", "satisfaction with life", "income". The average values of these indicators are higher in a cluster with a high level of interpersonal trust. Using t-test, we proved that the difference between the indicators in the clusters is significant. Gender split is mostly equal in both clusters. This suggests that the level of interpersonal trust is the same for both sexes. It was shown that the coefficients of variation of traits in clusters do not exceed the coefficients of their variation in the whole sample (except for a slight deviation), which indicates that such clusterization indeed captures valuable characteristics of the population.