Introduction

Abstract

Trust is not an easy word to use. A few examples are provided to see why trust is not easy to use. Nevertheless, when trust is used, three threads are often pointed and articulated by social scientists: 1) democracy (Putnam), 2) prosperity (Fukuyama), and 3) stability (Luhman). Yet gauging trust in relation is not easy either for three problems: 1) heavy use of national sampling theory. 2) face-to-face interviewing versus responses without face-to-face interactions, and 3) linguistic equivalence versus linguistic ambivalence. After discussing the conceptual and methodological issues, Part I, dealing with interpersonal trust, and Part II, dealing with institutional trust follow. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 examine components of what is called social capital across Asian societies using factor analysis. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 examine and analyse interpersonal trust in relation to unhappiness, interpersonal trust in relation to quality of life, and social trust in relation to happiness respectively. In Part II, Chaps 9 and 10 analyse trust in political institutions. Chapter 9 examines citizens’ confidence in political and other institutions across 18 Asian and European countries. Chapter 10 examines the ways in which citizens express their preference in Japan: retrospective, prospective, sociotropic and/or pocketbook. Chapter 11 examines the working poor in Japan relating income to health and health utilization. Chapter 12 examines the relationship between trust in mass media and the health care system on the one hand individual health on the other. Given conceptual and methodological difficulties associated with trust, what might be viewed as the Procrustean practice of comparison and generalization should be moderated.

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2305-7_13