Explaining the Trust Paradox: How Foreign Media Strengthens Government Confidence via Political–Economic Awareness—and for Whom—in China

This dataset accompanies the manuscript \"Explaining the Trust Paradox: How Foreign Media Strengthens Government Confidence via Political-Economic Awareness—and for Whom—in China\" (Zhao & Liu, 2025, submitted to Political Communication). It contains the fully de-identified, replication-ready microdata from the 2021 Internet Users' Social Awareness Survey (N = 3,693), as well as metadata and documentation files. [Updated August 2025] Version 2.0: Data consistency corrections applied - unified sample size and variable means across all materials. Contents: data.csv: Cleaned, de-identified respondent-level dataset (all direct identifiers, IP addresses, and timestamps removed). README.md: Detailed description of variables, data provenance, and usage instructions. LICENSE.txt: Licensing information (CC-BY-4.0 for data, MIT for code). CITATION.cff: Citation metadata for automated referencing. (2025-06-26) Data consistency update: Corrected sample size to N=3,693 and unified variable means across all manuscript versions.