Information Privacy Situation Awareness: Construct and Validation

Abstract

Most contemporary studies on information privacy focus on individuals' privacy concerns and attitudes, but pay little attention to the role that a specific situation plays in regulating behavioral outcomes. To correctly capture people's personal information disclosure behavior in online settings, it is necessary to incorporate situation awareness (SA), i.e. individuals' ability to deal with a situation-specific environment with only limited cognitive resources at their disposal. In this paper, we propose a new construct, Information Privacy Situation Awareness (IPSA), as a specialization of SA with emphasis on information privacy. Based on a comprehensive literature review, focus group interviews, and a questionnaire administered to Facebook users, we developed a measure and items for IPSA. The major contribution of this study is a conceptualization of IPSA that demonstrates the importance of accounting for situation awareness in privacy models and serves as a catalyst for further research related to the dynamics of information privacy.

• Information Privacy
• Situation awareness
• Rating Scale Model
• Privacy construct
• Social networks