Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to submit your manuscript to SPPS

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
American Behavioral Scientist
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
0002764209331531v1
52/12/1646    most recent
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Rahn, W. M.
Right arrow Articles by Loflin, K.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Geographies of Trust

Wendy M. Rahn

University of Minnesota, St. Paul and Minneapolis

Kwang Suk Yoon

American Institutes for Research, Washington, D.C. with

Michael Garet

American Institutes for Research, Washington, D.C.

Steven Lipson

American Institutes for Research, Washington, D.C.

Katherine Loflin

Knight Foundation, Miami, Florida

Generalized social trust is an important component of social capital and has been linked to a variety of individual- and community-level outcomes, including low crime rates, effective government, and healthy and happy citizens. Drawing on a multicommunity survey conducted in several American towns and cities in 2002, the authors examine the individual and contextual origins of general social trust using the techniques of Hierarchical Linear Modeling. Based on prevailing theoretical understandings of social trust, the authors posit a comprehensive model to account for the contextual variation that remains after controlling for individual-level variables. Two community-level variables, voter turnout and commute times, emerge as important contextual predictors of social trust. The authors explore community attachment as a potential mediator of these effects, finding that it partially mediates the impact of commuting but not voter turnout, results consistent with their distinction between "experiential" and "cultural" theories of social trust formation.

Key Words: social trust • social capital • community attachment • multilevel models

This version was published on August 1, 2009

American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 52, No. 12, 1646-1663 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0002764209331531
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?