The increased comparative research on perceptions of public welfare deservingness studies the extent to which different subgroups of citizens are deemed worthy or unworthy of receiving help from the welfare state. The concept of deservingness criteria plays a crucial role in this research, as it theorizes a universal heuristic that citizens apply to rank people in terms of their welfare deservingness. Due to the mainly quantitative nature of the research and despite the indisputable progress it has made, the subjective existence and actual application of these deservingness criteria remain a bit of a black box. What criteria of deservingness do citizens actually apply, and how do they apply them? This article opens the black box of welfare deservingness and sheds light on the nature and practice of deservingness criteria. Empirically, the paper explores how the deservingness of immigrants is discussed and established within 20 focus groups conducted in Slovenia, Denmark, UK and Norway in 2016 with a total of 160 participants. All 20 focus groups discussed the welfare deservingness of immigrants based on similar vignette stimuli. Our analysis shows that (1) deservingness criteria are used both to construct images of target groups and as normative yardsticks; (2) deservingness criteria do not work independently of each other, but rather co-function in specific hybridized discourses; and (3) the moral logic of deservingness is supplemented by alternative moral logics, at least in the case of migrants.

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Georg Simmel is the seminal author on trust within sociology, but though inspired by Simmel, subsequent studies of intersubjective trust have failed to address Simmel’s suggestion that trust is as differentiated as the social relations of which it is part. Rather, trust has been studied within limited sets of exchange or work relations. This article revisits Simmel’s concept of trust as social form in order to investigate this differentiation. From an interview study, the differentiation and limits of trust are analysed within different types of social relations. Trust is found to vary greatly in scope and mode influenced by the intersecting dimensions of relations, objects and situations. Furthermore, trust exists between an outer threshold of expected deceit and an inner threshold of confident reliance. The findings from the qualitative study contribute new knowledge on the diversity of trust, opening new avenues of sociological investigation of trust outside exchange and work relations.

Contemporary trust research regards trust as a way of dealing with uncertainty and risk.Predominantly, it suggests that trust reduces uncertainty by means of risk assessment and rational calculation. However, phenomenological research proposes that trust is an alternative way of relating to uncertainty rather than a way to reduced uncertainty. This paper investigates these propositions in an interview study on intersubjective trust. The study focuses on the modes of uncertainty management employed in trust and risk, and particularly on how knowledge, experience, familiarity, and decision-making are combined in the act of trusting. The main finding is that trust and risk are better characterised as different ways of perceiving the social and managing uncertainty, than as different elements of the same decision process. The concept of 'risk compartmentalisation' is developed to describe the different ways people work to contain risk and maintain trust by combining adaptation and familiarity.

Generalized trust correlates strongly with many desirable institutional and societal characteristics and for this reason, variations in the level of generalized trust have been the object of intense scrutiny. However, the subjective contents of generalized trust have only been the object of theoretical, rather than empirical, investigation. This article adds some first, key insights into this issue and provides findings which fundamentally question the way we think about generalized trust. It investigates the subjective content of different levels of generalized trust in a mixed methods study analysing how trust dispositions relate to tolerance, solidarity and social identity. The study combines multiple correspondence analysis of survey data and thematic analysis of interview data in an iterative research design. The study suggests that generalized trust varies in multiple dimensions, rather than only one as assumed in survey items. First, generalized trust varies in a dimension of generalizability between whether trust should be generalized or not, rather than whether one should trust or not. Second, it varies in a dimension of justifications between assumptions of shared norms of trustworthiness and rational cooperation. In addition, the importance of experienced trustworthiness for generalized trust varies between different trust dispositions.

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The European Values Study (EVS) was first conducted in 1981 and then repeated in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, with the aim of providing researchers with data to investigate whether European individual and social values are changing and to what degree. The EVS is traditionally carried out as a probability-based face-to-face survey that takes around 1 hour to complete. In recent years, large-scale population surveys such as the EVS have been challenged by decreasing response rates and increasing survey costs. In the light of these challenges, six countries that participated in the last wave of the EVS tested the application of self-administered mixed-modes (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland). With the present data brief, we will introduce researchers to the latest wave of the EVS, the implemented mode experiments, and the EVS data releases. In our view, it is pivotal for data use in substantive research to make the reasoning behind design changes and country-specific implementations transparent as well as to highlight new research opportunities.