Estimation of the Integrated Scale Relation to the Particular Characteristics of Trust in the Police in Russia on the ESS Database

The work is devoted to verification of the validity of the ESS tool for measuring police trust in Russia. ESS measures the level of police trust by a question that implies an assessment on an eleven-point scale. In 2010, as a rotating block, a number of questions were employed to measure the police trust. To provide a solid ground, an attempt to combine performance theory and procedural justice theory is made. How does the integrated scale relate to the particular characteristics of trust in the police in Russia? The urgency of the issue is caused by the fact that trust in the police is associated with an increase of the propensity to cooperate with them, the recognition of their legitimacy. This leads to positive externalities: high rates of economic growth and activity, development of financial markets, etc. In this light, there is a need for explanatory concepts, relevant tools, adequate indicators to identify the problem when it appears. It was revealed that procedural justice model worked better. Its indicators are divided into two factors. Among performance theory indicators, the speed of reaction on calls fits poorly into the latent structure of trust. It does not join other two indicators of the factor "police performance" and has the least effect on the overall level of trust. Latent variables explain only a third of the variation in the overall level of police trust in Russia. Contact with the police does not have an explanatory power for variation in the structural elements of trust. A methodological peculiarity is the categorical method of the main components, which allows to determine the optimal distances between gradations of scales. The generalization of the model is realized with the help of an analogue of the reduced chi-square test, which has no restrictions on the tolerance range of the compared values.