Riitta Kyllönen

University of Tampere, Finland

23^rd Nordic Sociological Conference

18-20 August 2006

Turku, Finland

Abstract prepared for the session ’Trust, civic engagement and social capital’

chaired by: Antti Kouvo

Trust In Question. Lessons From the Field

As qualitative cross-cultural research projects are multiplying, issues of comparative fieldwork become increasingly in focus. Yet little theoretical analysis has been done on fieldwork from a comparative perspective. It is often analytically disregarded that already the act of entering the field is culturally conditioned.

Based on a two-country project (Italy and Finland) on elderly care, this paper first briefly explores the different approaches/strategies that needed to be built to get access to the elderly caree in the two countries. I am reflecting the issue from my transnational background as a researcher located between the two cultures.

The differences in the fieldwork approaches are then explored through the concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘(social) networks’. Finland is one of the countries in the Northern Europe with high level of generalized trust, whereas Italy ranks quite low in it. The paper discusses the implications of the different cultures of trust to fieldwork strategies. Attention is paid in particular to the role of the researcher in creating trust, and to the transaction costs in getting into touch with the elderly caree in a context (Italy) where generalized trust is scarce.

Based on the insights from the fieldwork analysis, the paper moves on to critically discuss some limitations in much work on social capital, e.g. the way how trust is often conceptualized for research.