Information Privacy Situation Awareness: Construct and Validation

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.

Website: http://www.arjonline.org/engineering/american-research-journal-of-computer-science-and-information-technology/