A theoretico-methodological understanding of the concept of trustworthiness in sociology and adjacent branches of knowledge

Abstract

The paper focuses on the understanding of the trustworthiness concept in various realms of academic knowledge, as well as on possible intersections of these interpretations with the understanding of trustworthiness in sociology. Despite quite a frequent usage of the word “trustworthiness” in daily life and a completely “transparent” etymology of this word (“trustworthy”, that is worthy of trust), there is not an established definition of the term “trustworthiness” in academic literature. For example, V. Shlapentokh defines trustworthiness as a property which characterises the degree of adequate reflection of particular features of the social phenomena and processes under study, whereas V. Volovych regards trustworthiness as a degree of correspondence between the gained knowledge and reality. According to Y. Elez, trustworthiness is the way the truth exists “for us”, the way that reflects the correspondence between the truth and its provenness by a cognizing subject. There may be certain difficulties in translating this term. In English, “trustworthiness” literally means “the quality of being worthy of trust”, but we can also come across the word “credibility”, which can be interpreted as “believability” or “cogency”. Besides, there are a number of other concepts such as “truthfulness”, “verifiability”, “consistency”, “certainty”, etc., which are somewhat related to trustworthiness and have similar meanings. In empirical sociological research, trustworthiness mostly relates to validity and reliability. Y. Lincoln and E. Guba developed a set of criteria for assessing the trustworthiness of qualitative research, which are comparable to validity and reliability in quantitative studies. As for factors influencing the trustworthiness of acquired sociological information, they include the following: a) trust between an interviewer and a respondent (A. Irvine, P. Drew and R. Sainsbury); b) the researcher’s awareness of social, cultural and institutional aspects of the issues in question (V. Lub). The given paper does not pretend to provide an exhaustive coverage of the concept of trustworthiness; however, it can give impetus to the discussion on this topic. For instance, designing statistical indicators that allow assessing quantitatively the trustworthiness of sociological research results can be proposed as the first issue to address.