The Case of ‘Trust’ – Research on Social Capital in V4 Countries

The purpose of this article is firstly to discuss the basic theoretical approaches used to interpret the concept of trust in the context of social capital and then to present the results of research conducted on trust. The analysis concentrates on elements related to trust in the literature, reflecting the methodological approaches for assessing and measuring trust. In theoretically conceptualising trust we generally adopt Hardin’s explanations (1991, 2002a, 2002b, 2006), which are then used as an interpretational framework for our research results. The paper mainly analyses and interprets subjective conceptual mental maps of trust developed on the basis of associations obtained in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia using the Associative Group Analysis Technique. The participants were management and economics students and there were 100 of them in each country (50 female and 50 male; 50 from each capital – Prague, Budapest, Warsaw and Bratislava; 50 from a smaller town in each country – Ostrava, Szeged, Olsztyn and Prešov). Altogether 400 students in four countries completed the tasks. In this article we mainly present the results relating to the Slovak section of the research sample.