PhD Student: Clare Harewood; Partner: Birmingham Voluntary Service Council; Supervisors: Prof. Jessica Pykett and Dr. Gerald Jordan; School: School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Trust is widely acknowledged as being foundational to all human relationships, shaping if and how they are built and sustained over time. Trust is also a well-established factor in the success or failure of partnership working in the community and voluntary sector. While psychological research on interpersonal trust, trust measures and behaviour are well-established, interdisciplinary approaches that integrate psychology and social science perspectives on partnerships in the voluntary and community sector (VCS) in the context of socio-economic and political changes, are lacking. Despite long-standing calls to incorporate psychological expertise into the UK’s VCS practice, particularly given its vital role in serving marginalised groups amid shifts in welfare provision, such interdisciplinary approaches are yet to be developed.
Participatory Research, which positions communities as equal partners in the research process, is rooted in relational practice, yet it is often conducted alongside individuals and communities who may lack trust in institutions and their representatives. Trust building and maintenance can therefore be seen as essential for effective participatory research practice.
Despite this, existing literature highlights the lack of interrogation of the operation of trust within Participatory Research, and points to the need for increased exploration of the processes and pathways to develop and sustain trust, and attention to the impact of this activity. In recent years, there have been efforts to increase conceptual clarity to enable this. The work of Gilfoyle et al., (2022) for example, draws attention to trust operating as a context, mechanism and outcome for Participatory Research activity. They highlight a key research gap in how trust is conceptualised, operationalisedand measured, calling for future research to address the complexities, variability and multidimensionality of trust in relation to CBPR.
The expansion of Participatory Research has been supported through theoretical advancement, particularly the development of a conceptual model for CBPR (Wallerstein et al., 2008; Wallerstein et al., 2017) – one framework for PR which has been widely applied within health research. The CBPR model identifies the social geographies, contextual (partnership practices) and process-related factors (research/intervention engagement factors) that can affect both intermediate (stronger partnerships) and long-term outcomes (improved health/health equity, community transformation).
A systematic review (Jagosh et al., 2012) highlighted the importance of partnership synergy as a central relational process in impactful CBPR. In this, and subsequent evaluation activity (Jagosh et al., 2017), trust emerged as an important concept, with contextual factors (such as a community’s history of oppression or research abuse) found to trigger mistrust which negatively impacted partnership synergy (Jagosh et al., 2012), and trust building and maintenance operating as a key mechanism for supporting partnership synergy (Jagosh et al., 2017).
This study combines insights of psychological, voluntary sector studies, health inequalities researchers and social geography scholars who have developed and tested the CBPR conceptual model. It will examine the context and operation of trust in the voluntary sector in light of classical analysis of the so-called ‘shadow state’ (Wolch 1990) and its more recent development in the ‘post-welfare’ and ‘symbiotic’ systems-based accounts of welfare polices in the UK (DeVerteuil et al 2020).