Trust in doctors: Are African Americans less likely to trust their doctors than white Americans?

Prior research yields mixed results about black–white difference in trust in their doctors, and existing studies are often based on nonrepresentative, local, or cross-sectional samples. Using data from the 1998, 2002, and 2006 General Social Surveys—nationally representative samples—and ordinary least squares regression, this study reexamines this issue. It was expected that blacks are less likely to trust their doctors than whites either before or after controlling for other predictors of trust and that there was no significant change in this relationship over the time period under study. The results indicate that blacks were less likely to trust their doctors than whites only in 2002, but not in 1998 and 2006. This finding suggests that, even with the same source of data, empirical support for the claim about the less trust of blacks in doctors than whites is less robust than conventional belief, and it calls for additional, careful reexamination.