Trust in communication and public relations research: Literature review

Abstract

In modern society, it is important for people to establish good relationships with their environments, to get support from their entourage, to be loved and respected, to be trustworthy and honorable. Organizations, which are appreciated and supported, manage to gain the trust of the society, to improve their business and to earn recognition, having more opportunity to run all their business operations comfortably and efficiently. For organizations' communication process, the notion of trust is as important as it is for interpersonal communication. People and organizations are always in touch with each other in social systems. Trust has a vital effect on this interaction process. Trust, as one of the cornerstones of individuals' and organizations' interactions with their environments, has become an important concept for many different disciplines of social sciences to analyze and research. One of the basic purposes of public relations practices is being able to gain the trust of the target audiences, in the name of the person or organization(s) they work for. When the definitions of public relations are investigated in the relevant literature, one can notice that public relations is related to the notion of trust in most of the definitions made. For this reason, trust has become a subject which is studied and researched by many academicians lately. The purpose of this study is to analyze the quality and quantity of information about existing scientific research in communication and public relations disciplines about the notion of trust. The study aims to present the overall situation regarding trust. The general situation of the subject in question is explained by taking the existing studies in these disciplines into consideration in this research. Moreover, missing points in the existing studies are determined by reviewing the literature as a part of the study. Another aim of this research is organizing new academic studies, by making comparisons between nationally relevant literature and internationally relevant literature. With this comparison, it may be possible to create new topics and ideas for future academic studies; new study fields will be generated by identifying target audiences, which are yet to be investigated in terms of their attitudes and behaviors related to trust. For all these purposes, master and doctorate theses written in Turkey from 2000 to 2014, and the 25 most downloaded articles (Top 25) from the Science Direct database index with the keywords "trust", "public relations", and "communication", have been analyzed. By analyzing the findings, a variety of suggestions are made with regard to the discipline.