CULTURAL INSECURITY, SOCIAL TRUST, AND EVERYDAY ADAPTATION IN CHANGING COMMUNITIES

Abstract

Cultural, demographic, and social changes are now happening at a quick pace and are affecting how communities experience their identity, trust, and adjustment. The current study explored the links between cultural insecurity, social trust, and adaptation to the everyday world, based on country-level data from the World Values Survey. A cross-sectional design with a quantitative approach was used for processing 234 country-wave observations, 213 complete observations from 95 countries and six waves of the survey were used for analysis. Cultural insecurity, social trust and everyday adaptation composite indices were created and tested for reliability, followed by Pearson correlation, hierarchical regression and bootstrapped mediation analysis. Everyday adaptation was negatively correlated with cultural insecurity and positively correlated with social trust. The final regression model indicated that cultural insecurity was a strong negative predictor; social trust and survey wave each were strong positive predictors and accounted for 12.4% of the variance in adaptation when adjusted for other variables. Results of mediation analysis indicated that social trust independently predicted adaptive outcomes but did not significantly mediate the relationship between cultural insecurity and everyday adaptation (95% CI of mediated effect did not contain zero). The results show that cultural insecurity has a direct impact on adaptive capacity, and that in turn, social trust has a protective social resource effect. Greater cultural recognition, inclusive governance, intercultural involvement, and institutional trust, therefore contribute to build up resilience and adaptation in evolving communities.