Can We Trust Measures of Political Trust? Assessing Measurement Equivalence in Diverse Regime Types

Do standard “trust in government” survey questions deliver measures which are reliable and equivalent in meaning across diverse regime types? I test for the measurement equivalence of political trust in a sample of 35 former Soviet and European countries using the 2010 Life in Transition Survey II conducted by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Employing multiple group confirmatory factor analysis, I find that trust perceptions in central political institutions differ from (1) trust in regional and local political institutions, (2) trust in protective institutions like the armed forces and police and (3) trust in order institutions like the courts and police. Four measurement models achieve partial metric invariance and two reach partial scalar invariance in most countries, allowing for comparisons of correlates using latent factors from each model. I also found some clustering of measurement error and variation in the dimensionality of political trust between democratic and autocratic portions of the sample. On some measurement parameters, therefore, respondents in diverse cultures and regime types do not have equivalent understandings of political trust. The findings offer both optimism and a note of caution for researchers using political trust measures in cross-regime contexts.</p

Assuming Identities Online: How Linguistics Is Helping the Policing of Online Grooming and the Distribution of Abusive Images

In this chapter we seek to elucidate the potential of linguistic analysis in the undercover pursuit of criminals online. We examine the relationship between language and online identity performance and address the question of what linguistic analysis is necessary and sufficient to describe an online linguistic persona to the extent it could be successfully assumed by another individual. We compare the performance of trainee undercover officers (UCOs) at online impersonation of a specific individual before receiving any linguistic training to their performance after such input. We also report on a series of experiments in which participants engaged with each other over Instant Messaging (IM), before an impersonation situation was engineered. Information was collected about what level of accuracy and confidence individuals can detect the substitution of one interlocutor with another, what linguistic criteria give rise to such suspicions, and how individuals prepare for impersonation tasks. We also draw on other data sets including from police training and operational settings where identity disguise is employed online in the context of investigations into child grooming and the distribution of abusive images