Fears of cyberterrorism, terrorism, and terrorist attacks: an empirical comparison

ABSTRACT

The goals of this study are to identify the determinants of the fear of cyberterrorism and to compare these to the determinants of the fear of terrorism as well as the fear of a terrorist attack. As no empirical study has yet tested what predicts the fear of cyberterrorism, the current research used variables from the fear of terrorism literature to explore the impact of these factors on the fear of cyberterrorism. Based on nationally representative data from the 2018 American Fears Survey (N = 1190), our analytic results indicated that fear of cyberterrorism is a distinct fear when compared to terrorism and terrorist attacks in terms of their predictors, and age and education are significant determinants for fear of cyberterrorism, but not for the two terror-related fears in our sample. Other similarities and differences between the three measures of terror-related fear are also discussed in the study.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyberterrorism
• terrorist attack
• fear
• media exposure
• generalized ordered logit

Acknowledgement

The survey data were downloaded from the Association of Religion Data Archives, www.TheARDA.com

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The survey included questions on getting news from other media sources such social media news, but the online news question used was the one that had the highest numbers of respondents that reported on their most frequently used source of news.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ismail Onat

Ismail Onat, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Scranton. His research focuses on risk analysis in crime and terrorism, safety perception, fear, and media and crime.

Mehmet F. Bastug

Mehmet F. Bastug (Corresponding Author), PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Scranton. His research focuses on online radicalization, cyberterrorism, and cybercrime.

Ahmet Guler

Ahmet Guler, PhD, is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University, University Park teaching in criminology and criminal justice. His research focuses on criminal justice policy, policing, terrorism, criminal justice reform, information technology in criminal justice, and transnational crime.

Sedat Kula

Sedat Kula, PhD, is a senior researcher at Global Centers for Security Studies. His research focuses on police management and behavior, criminal justice policy, terrorism, and fear of crime.