The Fragility of Global Comparisons of Perceived Scientist Trustworthiness: Evidence from Measurement Alignment across 68 Countries/Regions

TL;DR

This study reveals that cross-national comparisons of perceived scientist trustworthiness are fragile and potentially misleading when measurement invariance is not properly established, emphasizing the importance of latent-variable methods like measurement alignment.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates the application of measurement alignment to re-evaluate cross-national trust data, highlighting the limitations of observed-score comparisons and proposing more robust latent-variable approaches.

Findings

Cross-national comparisons based on observed scores can be misleading.

Measurement alignment improves the validity of cross-country comparisons.

Associations with populist attitudes are non-robust when proper measurement methods are used.

Abstract

Cologna et al. (2025) compared perceived scientist trustworthiness across 68 countries/regions and examined its associations with individual- and country-level factors. While the authors reported that the scale did not satisfy metric and scalar measurement invariance, their subsequent cross-national/regional comparisons and regressions were nonetheless conducted using weighted means of observed item scores, implicitly assuming cross-country/region comparability at the observed-score level. Using the publicly shared dataset, we re-evaluated these conclusions by systematically applying measurement alignment under four analytical paths: pooled-sample versus country/region-specific confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), each estimated with and without weights. Across all specifications, cross-national/regional CFA supported configural and metric invariance but failed to establish scalar or strict invariance. Importantly, under the analytical path most closely corresponding to the original study (pooled CFA with weights), only the competence and openness factors yielded admissible aligned solutions within the four-factor model. Using aligned latent scores for these two dimensions, country/region rankings changed for 62 of the 68 countries/regions. Substantive conclusions also differed: associations between perceived scientist trustworthiness and science-related populist attitudes or social dominance orientation were near zero or non-robust, whereas attitudes toward science remained strongly and positively related. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that cross-national/regional comparisons based on observed-score averages may be misleading when measurement equivalence is not established, and that latent-variable approaches such as alignment provide a more defensible basis for international inference.