Linking Social Networks and Trust at Multiple Levels: Examining Dutch Elementary Schools

Abstract

The study of social relationships using a social network perspective has recently gained popularity among policy makers and educational researchers around the world. Yet, while literature associates strong social networks with trust among educators, the relationship between social networks and trust in school teams has received limited empirical attention. Moreover, large-scale studies on teachers’ professional relationships and trust at multiple levels of conceptualization and analysis are scarce. This chapter adopts a social capital perspective to investigate teachers’ professional relationships in Dutch elementary schools and its influence on teacher trust at multiple levels of analysis. Data were collected from 751 teachers and principals from 49 Dutch elementary schools using a social network survey and a Likert-type scale to assess teacher trust. We analyzed the data using social network analysis and multilevel (HLM) analysis. Results show that while individual relationships among educators matter for their perceptions of trust, the pattern of social relationships in the school team as a whole is as important. Interestingly, schools in which educators show great reliance on one-to-one reciprocal relationships are characterized by lower trust in comparison to schools with fewer reciprocal relationships among educators. This implies that certain social network configurations may be unfavorable for trust among teachers.