CLASS Faculty Conferred as RGC Senior Research Fellow

Professor Yi-Hui Christine HUANG, Head and Chair Professor of the Department of Media and Communication (COM) at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), has been awarded funding from the Research Grants Council (RGC) under the 2024/25 Senior Research Fellow Scheme (SRFS). She is the first CityUHK scholar to be awarded the SRFS in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Business Studies panel, as well as the first communication scholar to receive this prestigious accolade.

Huang’s project, entitled “Navigating Trust in Turbulent Times: Gauging Situational Trust Dynamics Model (STDM) Through A Five-Year Longitudinal Study Across Chinese and Western Societies in Crisis Contexts”, has been awarded approximately HK$8 million for a five-year period, from 2025 to 2029.

The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the importance of institutional trust. Leveraging ongoing research projects encompassing over 40,000 samples from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK and the US, Huang identified four groups of trustors: resilient trustors, tentative converts, cautious progressors and persistent distrusters.

In this funded project, Huang will further explore the individual and interactive effects of various situational factors via a longitudinal mixed-method approach. This approach will combine quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as large language models to investigate institutional trust and trust cultivation strategies.

“By developing and testing the Situational Trust Dynamics Model, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the public reacts to trust deficits and the effectiveness of trust-based strategies across diverse cultural and social settings,” Huang says.