Measuring trust: a text analysis approach to compare, contrast, and select trust questionnaires

INTRODUCTION: Trust has emerged as a prevalent construct to describe relationships between people and between people and technology in myriad domains. Across disciplines, researchers have relied on many different questionnaires to measure trust. The degree to which these questionnaires differ has not been systematically explored. In this paper, we use a word-embedding text analysis technique to identify the differences and common themes across the most used trust questionnaires and provide guidelines for questionnaire selection. METHODS: A review was conducted to identify the existing trust questionnaires. In total, we included 46 trust questionnaires from three main domains (i.e., Automation, Humans, and E-commerce) with a total of 626 items measuring different trust layers (i.e., Dispositional, Learned, and Situational). Next, we encoded the words within each questionnaire using GloVe word embeddings and computed the embedding for each questionnaire item, and for each questionnaire. We reduced the dimensionality of the resulting dataset using UMAP to visualize these embeddings in scatterplots and implemented the visualization in a web app for interactive exploration of the questionnaires (https://areen.shinyapps.io/Trust_explorer/). RESULTS: At the word level, the semantic space serves to produce a lexicon of trust-related words. At the item and questionnaire level, the analysis provided recommendation on questionnaire selection based on the dispersion of questionnaires’ items and at the domain and layer composition of each questionnaire. Along with the web app, the results help explore the semantic space of trust questionnaires and guide the questionnaire selection process. DISCUSSION: The results provide a novel means to compare and select trust questionnaires and to glean insights about trust from spoken dialog or written comments.