Development of a Scale to Measure Trust in Public Health Authorities: Prevalence of Trust and Association with Vaccination

Abstract

Infectious disease outbreaks highlight the importance of trust in public health authorities to avoid fear and improve adherence to recommendations. There is currently no established and validated measure for trust in public health authorities. We aimed to develop and validate an instrument that measures trust in public health authorities and to assess the association between trust in public health authorities and vaccine attitudes. We developed 20 items to measure trust in public health authorities. After implementing a survey in January 2020, we investigated relationships between the items, reduced the number of items, and identified latent constructs of the scale. We assessed variability in trust and how trust was associated with vaccine attitudes, beliefs, and self-reported vaccine acceptance. The pool was reduced to a 14-item trust in public health authorities scale and we found that this trust model was strongly associated with acceptance of vaccines. Our scale can be used to examine the relationship between trust in public health authorities and adherence to public health recommendations. The measure needs to be validated in other settings to determine whether they are associated with other areas where the public question public health authority recommendations.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by National Human Genome Research Institute RM1HG009038.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical Statement

All authors have agreed on authorship, read and approved the manuscript, and given consent for submission and subsequent publication of the manuscript. This study was ruled exempt by the Institutional Review Board at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Additional information

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by National Human Genome Research Institute [grant number RM1HG009038].