Building Trust to Study Trust: Paving the Way for Applied Trust Research in Social and Resocializing Institutions

Trust plays a pivotal role when aiding individuals in vulnerable positions. However, understanding the practical dynamics of trust remains limited. Empirical research on trust, particularly in collaborative and applied settings, is scarce. Trust in communications training is often treated as a nebulous concept, complicating its operationalization. This article delineates the initial stages of an applied research project on trust building in encounters between practitioners and citizens in vulnerable positions, outlines our project’s design, and details our experiences with cultivating trust with our participants. Employing an applied conversation analytic approach, we use video- and audio-ethnography to capture everyday interactions between employees and residents in social and re-socializing institutions. Combining a trust-building approach to get access to the field with rigorous analysis, we eventually aim to identify indicators of trust and distrust. Our distinctive approach, combining design, execution, and collaboration with inspiration from participant-oriented research, ensures relevance, accessibility, quality, and feasibility of our research will contribute to the conceptualization of trust as a social interactional phenomenon. It fosters co-ownership with practitioners, enhancing the impact of our findings, and allows us to rewrite the teaching material for future generations of social workers.