Differentiated trust: navigating credibility landscapes in community-engaged research

Community-engaged research (CEnR) depends on mutual credibility between researchers and communities, yet the trust environment in which these collaborations operate has shifted as public confidence becomes more conditional and politically structured. Drawing on scholarship in the sociology of trust, epistemic injustice, and related fields, this paper applies the concept of differentiated trust to community-engaged research. Differentiated trust describes a pattern in which people grant credibility selectively across knowledge authorities based on institutional experience, political identity, and information environment. Differentiated trust asks a related question about how credibility has already been sorted among competing authorities before the collaboration begins. The paper examines how differentiated trust illuminates the role of epistemic trust, epistemic injustice, and identity work in contexts where communities are navigating competing authorities on the health topics research addresses. The paper argues that attending to differentiated trust can sharpen the practical relevance of these concepts for CEnR design and evaluation.