Determinants of online safety behaviour: towards an intervention strategy for college students

Abstract

How can young adults be motivated to enact security precautions? Communication about the risks of Internet use or online safety communication is a context in which personal responsibility is especially salient. The present research builds on Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) to examine the role of a previously unexplored variable, personal responsibility, in the protective behaviour of college students. Two studies are reported here. In the first (N = 565), the relationship of personal responsibility to safe (i.e. protective) online behaviour is tested in relationship to standard PMT variables. A multiple regression analysis of survey data shows that personal responsibility explained additional variance in protective behaviour after accounting for the effects of traditional threat and coping appraisal variables. Building on this, the second study (N = 206) examines the possibility of influencing personal responsibility through an intervention and experimental manipulation among college students. The experimental manipulation of personal responsibility found evidence of a causal relationship between personal responsibility and protective behaviour in the college student sample. Interactions with pre-existing levels of safety involvement and self-efficacy were uncovered. Based on the results, strategies for targeted online safety interventions are suggested.

Keywords:

• Internet
• online safety
• protection motivation theory
• personal responsibility
• self-efficacy

Acknowledgements

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not represent those of the National Science Foundation. Special thanks to our computer science colleague, Richard Enbody, for keeping us up to date in computer security issues. We thank our research assistants Sunny Liu, Doohwang Lee, Rebecca Hayes, and Christina Wirth for their contributions to this research. An abbreviated version of this study also appeared in Communications of the ACM, March 2008/Vol. 51, No. 3.

Conflict of interest disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant numbers 04-30318 and 1318885].