Using conjoint analysis to examine trust in nursing home services and the effect of transparency and accountability

Trust in the provision of nursing home services is crucial for their sustainability and proper functioning. Our study aims to test the idea that if service providers are more transparent and accountable about their services, their beneficiaries will trust them more. We argue that different arrangements of transparency, accountability, and regulation can impact the levels of trust in these services. Specifically, our research question is: How do core characteristics of accountability, transparency, and regulation in nursing home services affect the level of trust that beneficiaries have in them? To answer this question, we conducted a conjoint survey experiment in which we asked relatives of nursing home services in Spain (n=1009) to rate and rank different hypothetical profiles of nursing home models that randomly varied on four core dimensions of regulation, transparency, and accountability. The main objective of our conjoint experiment is to explore which attributes of policy providers and monitoring bodies are considered more trustworthy by different types of policy beneficiaries. We will examine the trade-offs in this decision-making to capture the relative importance of each of these factors, including the type of service provider, information provision, policy monitoring, or regulation mode. Our study provides important insights into the characteristics of these services that are most valued by consumers and more likely to generate support and trust.