Matthew Bevers

Quiz for Efficacy and Trust   

Matthew Bevers

Race and Ethnicity Soc 111

The Poverty of Trust in the Southern United States

In this survey the researcher tries to bridge two lines of research. One line is that the southern united states are more collectivist than other non-south regions. Collectivism is the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it. This, in the south, is exacerbated by four main factors, the loss of the civil war, slavery, religion, and poverty. The other line of research is that collectivist areas are generally less trusting than more individualistic based societies. What this research is exploring is the question of: are white southerners less trusting than non-southern whites? One unique thing about this survey is how it was conducted on an intranational standard, not international. Most surveys of this type explore international differences between different countries like between Japan and the United States. The methods of this research include asking Southerners three questions on trust exactly like the ones that we asked in our surveys. A number of control variables were used like income, education, community-type, and whether the respondent is fundamentalist or more liberal. The findings of this survey conclude that there is a strong effect on region in trust and Southerners respond less trusting than non-Southerners. As the researcher predicted, blacks in the south were not found to be less trusting than whites in the South. Overall, the researcher admitted that this research was a bit flawed in the area of data limitations. He said that it was hard for him to measure how collectivist social relations coexist with trust across different areas and regions.

Re-thinking the decline in trust: A comparison of black and white Americans

This paper is about how people in general are less trusting now than they were almost one hundred years ago. One of the ways some researchers have explained the lower levels of trust today is using generational perspective. Generational perspective is the idea that over time people become less trusting through generations because the more trusting generations, like the war baby group (1935-1944) is being replaced with more cynical and pessimistic generations. The other explanation is called period gaps. Period gaps are large changes in attitude not necessarily over generations, but over the general population. The findings for this study show that both of the hypothesis proposed are supported. The first hypothesis is that the post war generation of white Americans is more trusting than other generations of Americans. The other hypothesis is that there wouldn't be a noticeable difference in African Americans over generations.