Tools for Making Trust More Visible in Evaluation

If we proactively measure trust, trustworthiness, or psychological safety, we may uncover deeper insights into how real change takes place. To reflect on these questions, here we consider approaches used in other professions and industries that intentionally establish and assess trust. These sectors have been chosen because they prioritise relationships and trust as a core part of their work.

But as Deepa reminds us: “Relational evaluation does not replace established methods; it expands and grounds them.” Guidrey et al. go on to say that this may require “deviating from traditional objectivity, leveraging trusted intermediaries, and building connections with participants to ensure ethical data collection and analysis” (Guidrey et al., 2023).

It feels timely, therefore, and perhaps overdue, to think about how we measure trust across heritage and cultural programmes.

Getting to grips with how trust can be measured

One of the underpinning guides for evaluation across government is HM Treasury’s Magenta Book. Several evaluation methods that prioritise relationships are cited, including interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, and other participatory approaches. And while trust is implicit throughout the Government Social Research Code, do we risk diminishing its importance by not measuring it explicitly? How can we know whether trust is or isn’t an integral component of success and long-term impact if we do not assess it directly?

In the first section of this article, we look more closely at the framework that Social Capital provides.

We then explore other techniques, including those from the Trust Based Philanthropy Project and the Qualitative Impact Assessment Protocol (QuIP), that very purposefully shift the focus towards the quality and dynamics of relationships rather than purely quantitative data.

We also look beyond evaluation to professions where trust is foundational; if trust is absent or not protected, these practitioners are quite simply unable to do their job, can lose credibility or in some instances could lose their accreditation and ability to practice.

Measuring connections and networks to infer levels of trust

Social capital refers to the degree of personal relationships, social network support, and civic engagement within a community or place. Former Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane described social capital as vital to economic growth, calling human relationships “the hidden wealth of nations” (cited in Shostack et al., 2025).

For example, high social capital has been linked to economic growth, greater political engagement and improved public wellbeing (Putnam, 2000). If trust is a key component of strong relationships, then high levels of social capital are likely to indicate high levels of trust. When monitoring social capital, factors such as the following are examined:

• Reciprocity: willingness to help and expectation of help in return
• Social networks: the size and diversity of personal networks
• Civic engagement: participation in volunteering, community activities, or voting
• Sense of belonging: feelings of inclusion and community identity

One such social capital tool is SC-IQ, this assesses social capital using indicators including organisational membership, frequency of social interactions, civic participation, neighbourhood stability, crime rates, social network analysis, ego-network mapping, interviews, ethnographies, and case studies.

Traditional social capital frameworks, such as the SC-IQ, help to capture traditional views on trust, credibility, and relational closeness, i.e., the ‘trust infrastructure’. However, they often only partially account for the fear, power, and interpersonal risk dynamics that shape whether people feel able to speak up or admit mistakes, i.e., how psychologically safe they feel.

For example, how people deal with risks within that trust infrastructure i.e. you may trust someone to some degree but still not want to speak up out of fear of being judged, others becoming defensive or illicit a problem-solving response instead of validation or acknowledgement of a point of view.

To mitigate some of these limitations, we can look at other approaches too.

Finding insights through values-based questioning

The US-based Trust Based Philanthropy Project (TBP) uses an intriguing approach grounded in values and relationships. They have identified a set of questions designed to support insight-driven evaluation, which include:

• How well are we living into our values?
• Do our partners trust and value our support?
• How well are we supporting nonprofit partners in achieving their goals?
• How well are we strengthening the nonprofit ecosystem?
• What changes are we seeing in policies, practices, and systems over time?
• How can partners help us interpret and act on long-term data?

TBP’s approach supports trust-based thinking and aligns with systems approaches advocated by CECAN and the Magenta Book's Handling Complexity supplement. What might we find if more of this line of questioning were used in our own heritage-based evaluations?

The Everyday Heritage Grants give us some insights here. In this case study, we read about the importance of allowing “time for organic engagement with your chosen community partners. Establishing real and honest connections creates a safe space in which active participation can take place.” The case study also indicates how useful a project outline is if it can accommodate uncertainties and is flexible enough to respond to needs whilst in the field.

We can see from this example how the presence of trust between individuals and organisations can help manage risk, being comfortable with the unknown. From this work, we can understand that “Pioneering undertakings such as this project cannot be scripted” is fundamental in understanding this project and its successes.

The subtle art of measuring or establishing trust

Many professions, such as therapists, counsellors, coaches, or teachers, are built upon building trust with those receiving their services. The BACP Ethical Framework, for example, emphasises putting clients first and requires practitioners to build and maintain trust as part of their practice, i.e., they are accountable to a professional body to actively practice these skills and engage in this way of being with their clients.

Trust in the practitioner is assessed by the practitioner through behavioural cues, such as willingness to be vulnerable, emotional openness, reduced defensiveness, fewer cancellations, greater engagement, and the ability to repair ruptures. Monitoring may involve verbal check-ins, feedback questions, or reflective conversations.

Formal tools also exist, such as the Working Alliance Inventory, Session Rating Scale, or CORE-OM/CORE-10, although the skills developed through training, accreditation, and CPD by the practitioner can often detect issues without them. These professions demonstrate how the role of the practitioner or the relationship that they proactively build with participants is as valuable, if not more so, than any tool used when establishing and maintaining trust.

Similarly, the Qualitative Impact Assessment Protocol or QuIP, seeks to understand what drives change by prioritising the perspectives of the people a programme is meant to benefit, using the role of the researcher to partially do this. The approach focuses on context-specific impact and emphasises participant comfort through the use of local language, conversational tone, and storytelling dynamics.

Researchers begin with open-ended questions to identify broad areas of change before moving into more targeted, programme-specific questions. Hand-written notes are collected and analysed using Causal Mapping Qualitative Data Analysis.

This approach highlights that the role of the evaluator and having methods which are subtle and easily adaptable to participants can be as important as the tools themselves.

Measuring trust to understand collaboration

Looking further afield to Healthcare professionals, they rely heavily on trust to enable successful collaboration to take place. Corbaz-Kurth et al. (2025) note that trust is essential for initiating collaborative processes, facilitating communication, enhancing teamwork, and improving patient outcomes.

D’Amour et al. (cited in Corbas-Kurth et al. (2025)) outline five components of trust-building: sharing [1], partnership, power, interdependency, and process. Corbaz-Kurth’s framework, based on an Interpretive Phenomenological Approach (IPA) and NVivo analysis, identifies several determinants of trust.

Questions used by researchers include:

• How often do informal or face-to-face meetings occur?
• Can team members laugh together?
• Are ruptures easily repaired?
• Do individuals demonstrate good listening skills?
• Is humility evident?
• Are silos actively broken down?
• Is there a constructive process for addressing mistakes?

Trust is built cumulatively through small, consistent acts (as evidenced by the above line of questioning), with many understanding that failing to understand this can lead to poorer outcomes for their patients. These questions could be reinterpreted/developed for evaluative purposes as indicators of levels of trust in multi-partner cultural and heritage programmes, revealing how collaborative these partnerships are and their contribution to overall success.

Final thoughts

If evaluation is to support meaningful decisions across the heritage and culture sectors, relationships and trust would be a useful component to draw out further and prioritise. This prompts some important questions, such as:

• How do we monitor how trust manifests—for example, what are the indicators of high trust, low trust, ambivalence, distrust or psychological safety (before and after)?
• What characteristics must we exhibit to support trust as Evaluators and Programme/Project Officers?
• Using learnings from our evaluations, what can we do to build trust for longer-term positive impact for the projects and programmes?

To answer some of these questions, the approaches described above offer ways to explore trust more intentionally during an evaluation. But if nothing else, the above approaches highlight the need to listen—not listening to respond or defend, but to deeply understand. In doing so, we gain insights into how short-term and long-term change takes place, and trust-based evaluation becomes a tool or pathway for deeper learning, stronger social infrastructures and longer-term positive change.

Footnotes

[1] Sharing refers to the responsibilities, values, processes, decisions, information, healthcare philosophy, planning, and interventions common to the different professionals. Partnership entails collegial relationships, constructive authenticity, open and honest communication, reciprocal trust, respect, valorisation of colleagues’ contribution, and the pursuit of a common goal. Power is shared based on knowledge and experience instead of functions and titles. Interdependency means developing synergies between actors, centred on patients’ needs. Finally, processes refer to the dynamic, evolving, and interactive nature of collaboration. Also includes intercultural trust. This intercultural dimension of interprofessional collaboration adds to the complexity of trust development.

References

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2. Better Evaluation (2025) Qualitative Impact Protocol. Available at: https://www.betterevaluation.org/methods-approaches/approaches/qualitative-impact-protocol [Accessed 07.01.26]
3. Corbaz-Kurth, S., Weissbrodt, R., Maiko Juvet, T., Hannart, S., Krsmanovic, B., Salamin Plaschy, I., and Terrier, P. (2025) ‘How does trust emerge in interprofessional collaboration? A qualitative study of the significance, importance, and dynamics of trust in healthcare teams and networks’, Journal of Interprofessional Care, DOI: 10.1080/13561820.2025.2495013
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11. Trust Based Philanthropy Project. Available at: https://www.trustbasedphilanthropy.org/ [Accessed 13.01.26]