Future Directions and Conclusion

This chapter has articulated a discussion of trust and inherent conflicts within community­academic partnerships by identifying the soci­etal and research context of these relationships, as well as their relational and communication characteristics.

Some specific strategies within CBPR were presented as best practices for trust develop­ment, such as delineating the expectations of both parties and documenting the terms of agreement in a memorandum of understand­ing (MOU) or similar document. CBPR rela­tionships, based on its principles, also enable the development of contexts that support affective relationships with long-term commit­ments to each other, which ensure a high level of fit between partners of values and shared goals and products. This project has also illustrated the need to attend to the dialogic environment through repeated interactions, multiple contacts, and regular communication.

Despite this integration of the literature, there are still gaps in our knowledge about trust development and how this facilitates the capacity and effectiveness of partnerships. First, although we theorized about how trust develops in community-academic partner­ships, we still do not know how to move from CBT to KBT and IBT.

Trust development models are useful to understanding the broad categories of trust development, but we still need to know what goes into building the categories; these models have remained theoretical. Trust and CBPR researcher need to take this informa­tion beyond the theoretical to the practical.

Community-academic partnerships lack a definition of trust. In terms of measurement, a definition would act like a theoretical frame and help guide researchers to understand what is actually being measured; it is the concepts that help advance the measurement. Without a definition, do we really know what we are measuring? Trust researchers are also stuck in the paradigm of survey research, perhaps trust is best investigated using mixed meth­ods. Given the complexity of trust, as well as the call from CBPR to embrace an ecological perspective, mixed methods seems to be the logical choice for research that is transforma­tive and action oriented.

There are several trust types in the lit­erature, a few that were presented in this chapter, that warrant further investigation. For the most part, trust measurements focus on the characteristics of the person being trusted. Characteristics like reliability, cred­ibility, approachability, and so on, however, as Habermas articulated, are the situational hori­zons that change depending on who is doing the viewing. Trust types describe the situation and may therefore provide more information on how trust develops.

Finally, conflict in community-academic partnerships is inherent; therefore, it is dif­ficult to engage in trust discourse for fear that it raises suspicion. Trust investigation should have to move in the direction of identifying or understanding the elements that contribute to trust origination beyond the characteristics of the person asking to be trusted. For example, Barber (1983) talked about trust in terms of moral judgments, yet as far as the authors know, there are no mea­sures that look at the contribution of ethics to trust development. Similarly, Lewicki and Bunker (1995) posit that IBT is achieved by creation of joint products and goals, shared values, proximity, and shared identity; how­ever, shared identity in terms of homophile is absent from the literature, yet it seems that being “like” would be foundational. This is an empirical question.