ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the authors test the model of trust, using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as it specific government agency. It starts with general issues in the design of the survey that employs the traditional attitudinal model to studying trust in government. The chapter introduces a novel approach to assessing trust in administrative agencies using a survey experiment strategy. It focuses its initial experimental test of trust on one trust assessment: the influence of the EPA on assessments of fracking. The chapter introduces its second approach to studying trust in the EPA-a survey experiment. This second analytic strategy focuses on whether the EPA can change people's perceptions of fracking (hydraulic fracturation). Finally, the chapter assesses trust based on an indirect behaviour. In the combination of the traditional attitudinal and experimental models, the chapter presents a more compelling view of the processes shaping trust in the EPA than if we had only one of the methods.
