The Relationship Between Media Consumption and Social Trust (A case study of Tabriz City's Youths)

Given today’s fast and increasing changes in modern societies as well as the expansion of the scope of individuals’ actions beyond friends and relatives to institutions and organizations, social trust has gained special weight. Social trust gets weakened or reinforced by a number of factors, of which one is mass media. The present research aims to study the relationship between mass media (both domestic and world service) and social trust. A survey was carried out through a researcher-made questionnaire and with a sample of 600 young people aged between 18 and 33 from Tabriz city in 1392 (solar calendar). Multi-staged cluster sampling was used in the research. Findings indicate that domestic media (radio and television, papers and magazines) raise social trust and foreign media do the opposite. There was no significant relationship between media usage and inter-personal trust. However, there was a direct positive relationship between domestic media consumption and generalized trust to the Islamic republic, but there was a reverse relationship between foreign media usage and the two types of trust.