5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In this session, we will focus on measuring people’s assessment of the extent of trust in their society, which is a widely studied aspect of a society's relational well-being known as social capital. We encourage submissions of papers that introduce or demonstrate new methodological approaches for measuring various kinds of trust within a society. The rapid advancement of computational social science approaches has significantly transformed the available research designs and analytical tools for measuring social indicators. While various kinds of trust are typically assessed using attitudinal and vignette items, an exciting development in technology now allows us to measure trust in natural language settings such as social media and news reports. The rapid advancement of large language models (LLM) in multiple languages has made these new approaches more effective in overcoming social desirability bias, cost-efficient, and more powerful than ever before. Therefore, we most welcome papers that take advantage of these new opportunities.