Marcelina Collins, Armando Acosta, Corey Grabowski, Timberlee Warburton 

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Title:

The Correlation Between Trust in the Government and the Criminal Justice System.

Abstract:

There are many factors that influence trust in the criminal justice system and in the government as a whole. Some studies have found relationships between people's trust in the criminal justice system and factors such as parental influence (Wolfe et al. 2017), someones previous interactions with police, (Braga & Weisburd, 2011) ethnic minorities, immigrant populations, (JSTOR, 2007) and people's perceived legitimacy of authorities (Trust in the law, 2002). To the best our knowledge, no one has examined the relationship between trust in the government and trust in the criminal justice system. Thus, by taking a qualitative approach to this explanatory study, we hypothesized that those with more trust in the government have a more positive attitude toward the criminal justice system. We surveyed one hundred and thirty three students and social media users via a convenience sample. We used OLS regression to test this hypothesis. OLS regression is appropriate for our study because our dependent variable is measured at the interval level. Results are forthcoming.