The Star: September 07, 2023

The Star Thursday September 7 2023
16
NEWS
Latest Canterbury news at starnews.co.nz
Who do we trust in a pandemic?
A FATHER-DAUGHTER team
from Canterbury University
studied data from eight
countries to rank trust in health
authorities, media, experts, and
politicians.
Political science honours
student Alexa Schluter is the
lead author of the paper, ‘In the
Covid-19 pandemic, who did we
trust? An eight-country crosssectional
study’.
Her father, Professor Philip
Schluter, head of UC’s school of
health sciences, supervised her
research.
The pair worked with
clinicians and public health
researchers in Canada to
study data from 9000 survey
participants from Canada, USA,
England, Switzerland, Belgium,
Philippines, New Zealand, and
Hong Kong. The surveys were
carried out in late 2020.
In all countries surveyed,
public trust in health authorities
was highest. Conversely, public
trust in politicians ranked lowest
across the board.
However, in New Zealand,
trust in politicians was
significantly higher than in the
other countries studied. The
researchers linked this to data
from the Global Corruption
Perception Index that records
how transparent populations
believe their governments to be.
TRUST: Ashley Bloomfield and Jacinda Ardern had a high level of trust during the
Covid-19 pandemic.
PHOTO: GETTY
New Zealand’s high ranking
on this index may explain
our greater
levels of trust
in information
provided by
politicians.
Professor
Philip
Schluter
Schluter also
points to the
consistent
messaging delivered by
government and public health
officials in New Zealand.
“Here we saw the daily
briefing with the Prime Minister
and the Director General
of Health promoting the
same stance. By comparison,
information coming from US
political leadership sometimes
contradicted advice of health
authorities,” he said.
Alexa Schluter
was also interested
to see if political
orientation
affected
participants’ trust
Alexa
in government
Schluter
information.
“We found higher levels of
trust in government policy
expressed by those who
identified as right leaning or
conservative voters.
“That may reflect the fact that,
at the time of the pandemic, the
majority of countries surveyed
had conservative governments in
power,” she said.
The researchers believe their
paper has added relevance
within the context of the
‘infodemic’ identified by the
World Health Organisation as
a central challenge during the
Covid-19 pandemic.
A combination of
‘information’ and ‘epidemic’, the
term describes the rapid
spread of information, both
accurate and inaccurate,
enabled by the internet and
social media.
“In this environment, public
trust becomes an important
determinant in population
health outcomes, and that’s
quite a new idea,” said Professor
Schluter.
“These large-scale health
challenges will continue to
happen in future, so we really
need to understand what works
to foster public trust in health
interventions.”
The paper will be published
in the prestigious international
Journal of Global Health.
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