Leveraging shared social identities to build trusting relationships in Latine communities: Community health workers as crisis and risk communicators

Crises can negatively impact communities that are already marginalized by existing social systems. Building trusting relationships with these communities is paramount to crisis and risk communication effectiveness, but little work has focused on the strategies crisis and risk communicators use to do so. Against this backdrop, we conducted a two-phase qualitative study with community health workers (CHWs) working in Latine communities. CHWs typically come from the communities they serve and are tasked with communicating important crisis and risk communication information to community members. In Phase 1, 20 CHWs were interviewed, and 21 CHWs were interviewed for Phase 2. Our findings show that CHWs seek to build trusting relationships with community members by leveraging shared social identities drawing from two important identity-based theories in communication—communication theory of identity and social identity theory. Specifically, CHWs in our study leveraged social identities including ethnic, national, and immigrant identities; family members and neighbors; and as economically and legally precarious immigrants. Extending theorizing in crisis and risk communication, our findings also show that identities are not a panacea for trust building in crisis and risk contexts but can lead to identity disconnections that can negatively affect communication. However, our findings also show that CHWs navigate these disconnections through creative communication. Our discussion highlights the implications for crisis and risk communication theory and practice.