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Milwaukeeans less trusting than other Wisconsinites, study shows
By Amanda Ford
A study conducted by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Tom Moore said that Milwaukeeans are less trusting than other Wisconsinites.
Moore, a sociology professor, initiated the study after speaking with coworkers about trust. The study was conducted from January to March of this year, its results were released this summer.
“Bowling Alone” author Robert Putnam assisted Moore in completing the survey.
Putnam said Americans are less socially connected to one another today than they were at any point in the last 40 years. He said there has been a continual decline in social involvement and social networks.
Moore and Putnam asked about how many memberships people had in various organizations, as well as how closely people work within them.
Moore set out to find out if involvement in community and other organizations had an impact on how much people, specifically Milwaukeeans, trust each other.
He took two separate samples, 393 Milwaukee residents and 483 Wisconsin residents.
“(It’s) a very rough way of doing a comparison but it fits within our costs,” Moore said.
In a sample comparison, there is a limited amount of analysis that can be done. He said the data limits the ability to say why Milwaukeeans are less trusting.
Only 31 percent of Milwaukee has a high trust of others compared with the rest of Wisconsin at 63 percent. Only 26 percent of Milwaukee compared with 42 percent of Wisconsin trusts racial or ethnic groups other than one’s own.
Moore said the survey is one small sampling and it would be hard to draw any concrete conclusions from it.
“When you’ve got 40 different communities, you can really start to say, ‘OK, why do we see higher levels of trust in this community and less in that?’ ” Moore said. “We couldn’t do a survey that large (because) it would’ve been very expensive.”
The people surveyed were also broken down by income levels. The findings were not surprising, Moore said. He said he expected to see those who are “better off” trust others more.
Moore said people making less than $30,000 a year in La Crosse may be less poor than the families living in Milwaukee that make less than $30,000. He said the disparity in the cost of living could be part of the reason there are differences in the income and trust comparison.
Whether or not one trusts another can be thought of as a risk-assessment, Moore said.
“When we make a decision about how risky it is to do so, and if you know people you’re engaged with and you know others who know them, it’s a lot easier to take that risk,” he said.
Moore believed people’s level of trust for others is strongly based in social involvement, but said, the survey suggested that the differences in trust are far greater than the differences in social involvement.
Putnam argued in his book that a lot of the decline in social connections is the result of television viewing. Moore included questions about television watching, but said it ended up not being a good predictor of anything significant.
The general results of the survey show that those who are more educated, and subsequently have higher incomes, have higher levels of trust.
More said he hopes to compare Milwaukee to other cities and maybe understand the differences in trust.
On the Net: Community Involvement and Trust in Wisconsin report: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/ISPR/Summer05.pdf
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