Trust and Social Capital

Regardless of any approach taken for examining social capital, researchers continuously converge on some key issues such as trust and yet diverge on several others about concrete and consistent indicators for measuring social capital. Many researchers believe that presence or absences of social capital can be solely linked to trusting relationships people build with each other as well as social institutions of civil engagement. It is not clearly known however, whether trust itself is a precondition for generating social capital or whether there are other intermediary variables that can influence the role of trust in creating social capital. In addition, similar to social capital, the definition of trust is problematic and it remains a nebulous concept and equally, with many dimensions. Interests in the analysis of trust are wide spread among many disciplines, notably policy analysis, economic development, reliability and security of distributed computational systems and many others. The variety of approaches currently employed to investigate trust and different interpretations of its role in fostering social capital has resulted into a diverse array of knowledge about the concept and its relationship to social capital. This Chapter provides a broader overview of work on trust. It discusses how researchers have used trust as a proxy for measuring social capital.