Online Routine Activities and Self-Guardianship against Cyber Abuse

ABSTRACT

This study examines the effect of online lifestyles and routine activities on self-guardianship against cyber abuse. The data from a sample of U.S. adults (N = 746) was modeled using a binary logistic regression and Bayesian variable selection with the stochastic search algorithm. We found that, on average, victims who employ self-guardianship tend to be less engaged in online routine activities than victims who do not, suggesting online routine activities are not only an important risk factor for victimization in line with previous research, but they also affect victims’ decision-making about self-guardianship.

KEYWORDS:

• Cyber abuse
• victimization
• online routine activities
• self-guardianship
• bayesian variable selection

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The data analyzed in this study was collected as part of a larger study described elsewhere.

2. According to a longitudinal study by Difallah et al. (2018), MTurk has over 100,000 workers and around 2,000 active workers at any given time.

3. Number of iterations performed, excluding burn-in: 10,000; burn-in: 1,000.

4. Please note that the posterior probability of the model reflects the probability of this particular model in comparison with all other plausible models. With more co-variates included in the model, absolute posterior probability of a model is going to be lower compared with a model with only a few co-variates.