Trust and distrust towards the Norwegian health and and social services

Title: Trust and distrust towards the Norwegian health and social services Purpose: To investigate the level of trust between eight important welfare services in the Norwegian welfare state and how these trust levels varies between different factors. Theory: We ask if the differences can be explained primarily as a result of the differences between the users and their background (the culture hypotheses) or due to their actual experiences with the different services (the institutional hypothesis). Methods The data is retrieved from three national citizen surveys from the Norwegian Agency for Public Management and eGovernment from 2013, 2015 and 2017. We have made descriptive analysis. Findings: There are significant differences in users' trust in the various welfare services, where family doctor/GP (91 % trust) and Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration/NAV (52 % trust) as outliers. We find no obvious spillover effect between the NAV and GP trust for the same users. NAV-users have just as much confidence in the family doctor as others. Discussion: Our analysis suggests that it is primarily the features of the services that explains the significant difference in confidence between GP and NAV. It may be due to users’ evaluations of their experiences of the different services. This strengthens the institutional hypotheses.