Trust is essential to building and maintaining mutually respectful relationships,
especially partnerships involving patients or community stakeholders and researchers,
in which there is often an inherent imbalance of power. Patients and community members
who are stakeholders in the design and conduct of health research rely on researchers’
honesty and willingness to protect them from harm. Although human research protections
are in place for research participants, no such institutional protections are in place
to provide oversight for patients and community partners involved in the research.
Such vulnerability leads to lack of trust, which remains one of the most commonly
cited barriers to public participation in research, especially among groups underrepresented
in research.1 As public involvement in research continues to evolve, the types of
relationships with researchers have changed from being participants in research projects
to being consultants, advisory board members, and even patient and community principal
investigators. These new roles and increasing power for stakeholders have not diminished
the importance of trust. Instead, the need for trust is perhaps more important as
patients and community members must navigate less familiar research settings and must
depend on researchers to share resources, leadership, and decision-making.
The critical role of trust in public engagement is evident in publications emerging
from newer approaches to engagement such as those used in the National Patient-Centered
Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). The NYC Clinical Data Research Network modified
its engagement strategies to facilitate involvement of people with limited trust and
found lack of trust to be associated with concerns about data privacy and security,
and lack of confidence that findings would be shared with the community.2 Within PCORnet,
most networks identified trust as essential to achieving high levels of engagement
and the need to build and nurture trust was clear.3 The recurring themes of trust
and trustworthiness in public engagement also highlights the gap in our knowledge
related to the underpinnings of trust in community-academic relationships, the need
to measure, track, and improve trust, and the responsibility of researchers to become
more trustworthy.
If building trust is widely recognized as essential to engagement, why after decades
of community engagement in research, does trust remain so elusive? One challenge is
its complexity. Trust is a multidimensional construct and though the term is used
often, many people find it difficult to define. In general, trust refers to a firm
belief in the reliability, truth, and ability or strength of someone or something.4
Trust has also been defined as the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of
another party, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control the other party.5
An individual may have trust in a specific researcher or abstract trust in the research
enterprise. There are a number of factors that influence an individual’s level of
trust in research including educational attainment, cultural beliefs, and personal
as well as their community’s experiences with research. Despite its importance, little
is known about strategies to improve trust among research participants and we are
only beginning to consider trust among patients and community members who are involved
in research roles as collaborators and partners.
The lack of validated tools to measure trust hampers our ability to determine the
most effective ways to engender and improve trust. A systematic review identified
45 instruments that measure trust.6 The most frequently identified dimensions of trust
in health systems are honesty, competency, fidelity, confidentiality, and global/system
trust, whereas safety, fairness, and communication are more consistently identified
dimensions of trust in the research setting. All but 2 of those 45 instruments were
developed to measure trust in health systems or were designed for use by health professionals,
not researchers. Because the relationships between health providers and patients are
different from those between researchers and patient and community stakeholders, these
existing instruments are not ideal for assessing trust in research partnerships. This
difference was prominent in the work of the Greater Plains Collaborative, which contrasts
trust in patient versus community engagement.7 Trust among patients was more likely
built on interpersonal relationships, codified through formal processes, and unlikely
to be transferred to others.
Interestingly, concerns about safety and fairness are also more common among racial
and ethnic minorities8,9 and may reflect the underlying vulnerability that is inherent
in research. Personal experiences with health systems, unequal access to health care,
experiences with discrimination, and the history of unethical biomedical research
likely contribute to the lack of trust among minorities.1,10,11 Other groups experiencing
health inequities, such as individuals with lower educational attainment, also tend
to be less trusting of research and the medical establishment. Consequently, the populations
most likely to make research more relevant to them through engagement, are those less
likely to engage, and lack of trust is a major reason why. Understanding this variability
in levels of trust by population will require that trust measures be valid and relevant
across populations. Engagement is required, then, even to develop effective trust
measures.
Recognition of the different influencers and dimensions of trust is essential because
trust instruments that measure competency, fidelity, and confidentiality may not capture
lack of trust related to safety, communication, fairness, and negative intentions.
In addition, dimensions of trust may present differently in community-academic partnerships,
than among volunteers who are study participants. For example, a study participant
who lacks trust related to fairness may be concerned that he is more likely to be
randomized to placebo than a treatment deemed more beneficial, though a patient advocacy
organization partnering in a research study may not trust the research team to fairly
distribute resources.
Within the research setting, and perhaps more broadly in the health care system, the
focus on trust is often on changing the patients, participants, or community members
to make them more trusting. The attention is on the public’s lack of trust or distrust
in research, and typically not on whether researchers are trustworthy. This framing,
which may be subconscious, absolves researchers and the research enterprise of their
roles in the relationship. The onus is on the public to change and be more trusting.
Researchers and research institutions must place greater emphasis on being trustworthy
and creating a culture that is inclusive and mutually respectful. This will require
a shift in how researchers consider trust such that patient and community perspectives
on trustworthiness of the research enterprise are more central.
To enhance trust and build more effective patient and community-academic partnerships
will require tools and strategies based on 3 concepts (Fig. 1):
The most important dimensions of trust differ based on the role in the research such
that trust related to public involvement in more advanced research roles is often
related to fairness and communication, and less related to competency and systems
trust.
Characteristics of trustworthy researchers include being empathetic, accessible, approachable,
honest, respectful, attentive, and humble. These characteristics are as important
as, if not more than, technical competence and prestige of the research institution.
Strategies that enhance trust must build on the principles of community engagement12
including balancing power dynamics, equitable distribution of resources, effective
bidirectional communication, shared decision-making, and valuing of different resources
and assets (such as the lived experience and knowledge of group norms and perspectives).
FIGURE 1
Conceptual framework for enhancing trust among and community-academic partnerships.
Developing new tools to measure trust and testing interventions to improve trust must
be done in partnership with patients and communities. This will ensure that instruments
include content areas that reflect the research roles and include definitions and
perceptions of trust relevant to underrepresented populations. Valid tools will improve
understanding of trust and facilitate more precise assessment of strategies to amplify
trust. Ideally new approaches to enhance trust simultaneously address researchers’
trustworthiness and create more opportunities for colearning.