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Birth cohort and social change in Chinese college students’ interpersonal trust: A cross-temporal meta-analysis, 2000–2019

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Abstract

Whether social development promotes trust or hinders it has been a controversial issue. The study conducted a cross-temporal meta-analysis of 160 studies adopting Rotter’s Interpersonal Trust Scale (ITS) to investigate trust among Chinese college students and to explore the impact of social change on trust. The 160 papers involved 70, 394 college students, and the data was collected from 1998 to 2017. Results showed that the interpersonal trust among Chinese college students increased by 1.05 SD from 1998 to 2017. Besides, typical social development indicators and indicators related to college students are selected. The lay analysis was used to analyze the relationship between social indicators and the level of interpersonal trust among college students 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and at present. The results showed that trust was significantly positively correlated with college graduates, the gross domestic product (GDP), etc. 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and at present, respectively. While significantly negatively correlated with the unemployment rate and Gini coefficient at present. The above results indicate that interpersonal trust among Chinese college students presents an upward trend over time with social development. While the high unemployment and high Gini coefficients in the process of social development would be risk factors for trust growth in the future.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was partially supported by the Major Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (Award no. 18ZDA165) and Project supported by Open Research Fund of College of Teacher Education, Zhejiang Normal University (No. jykf20020).

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  1. College of Teacher Education, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, 321004, China

    Ningmeng Cao, Binghai Sun, Weijian Li & Guoan Yue

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  1. Ningmeng Cao
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Contributions

The authors would like to thank all members of the research group for their help with data collection. We also thank the National Nature Science Foundation of China and Zhejiang normal university for its financial support.

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Correspondence to Guoan Yue.

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The article was conducted retrospectively from data obtained for published papers. And the ethics committee of X determined that our study did not need ethical approval.

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Cao, N., Sun, B., Li, W. et al. Birth cohort and social change in Chinese college students’ interpersonal trust: A cross-temporal meta-analysis, 2000–2019. Curr Psychol 41, 6631–6641 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01172-7

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