Trust and Violence in Healthcare (2021-2022)
Health behavior relies on trust not only in the healthcare system and providers, but also in science and the channels through which scientific information is communicated. Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare faced a crisis of trust with an alarming growth in cases of violence against healthcare workers globally.
This project team documented the global incidence of violence in the workforce and its relation to trust in the health sector. Team members studied how the availability and sources of scientific information influence trust, especially in the context of the democratization of information in which individuals are unable to discern whether new information is correct or incorrect.
Team members scraped online news sources to document instances of reported violence against doctors, nurses and healthcare workers in the U.S., U.K., China and India. These instances were then collected in a database of violence against the workforce documented over a 10-year period.
Team members also reviewed the literature on trust, drawing from economics, game theory, political science, sociology and psychology. This year-long review led to a summary research paper.
Timing
Summer 2021 – Spring 2022
Anticipated Outputs
Database
Descriptive paper
This Team in the News
Interdisciplinary Researchers Discuss Faculty-Student Research
Meet the Members of the 2021-2022 Bass Connections Student Advisory Council
Image: Fight Against COVID-19 - Pourakarmika Personals, by Trinity Care Foundation, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0