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With our study, we validate a newly developed Rasch scale measuring an individual's commitment to informational privacy. This measure targets behaviour that typically leaves some digital remnants (e.g., in e-commerce, e-banking, e-healthcare, etc.). The Commitment to Informational Privacy Scale (CIP) consists of 50 self-reports of behaviour (58 in our current study) that people engage in to protect their informational privacy (e.g., "I pay cash" or "I use a search engine that promises more data security than Google"). In the early 2000s, people’s concern for their privacy was considered a main obstacle for the success of e-commerce (Malhotra et al., 2004). Whereas e-commerce is nowadays widely used, an individual's propensity to protect personal data and to control who has access to it, might still be an obstacle for technological innovations, such as smart-meters (see, e.g., Zeadally et al., 2013). As people seem, however, to profess personal opinions and views without acting upon these views—called the "attitude-behaviour gap", but also the "privacy paradox" (Norberg et al., 2007)—privacy concern measurement, especially when based on opinion polls, seems a rather futile endeavour. To overcome this attitude-behaviour gap, Kaiser and colleagues (e.g., Kaiser & Byrka, 2015; Kaiser et al., 2010) suggested to measure people’s commitment to a particular goal based on the behavioural means required for goal attainment. At the same time, any engagement in behaviour involves, figuratively speaking, costs. Voicing concern about data security violations is easy—it comes with little to no costs. Implementing and upholding behaviour to protect personal data (such as refraining from using social media or paying money for apps that ensure data protection) is arguably more demanding because it requires personal sacrifices (see also Kaiser & Wilson, 2004). Psychological scales based on self-reports of behaviour that take advantage of the distinct costs of behaviour have been shown to reliably measure people’s commitment to environmental protection (i.e., people’s environmental attitude: see Kaiser & Wilson, 2019). In several studies, such measures of people’s environmental attitude have already been proven prognostic for manifest environmental protection behaviour (see, e.g., Kaiser et al., 2020; Taube et al., 2018). In previous studies, we developed a formally analogous attitude scale to measure people's commitment to informational privacy. In this study, we test our theoretical assumptions about what defines commitment to informational privacy and how it manifests in people depending on how committed they are. We assume that, depending on how important people consider their informational privacy, their attitudes are developed in different levels and are reflected in different behaviours (cf. Kaiser & Lange, 2023/in press). 0) On the lowest level are people who do not care about informational privacy. If they nevertheless show privacy-protecting behaviours, it is probably because these are less burdensome than the alternatives. 1) At the first genuine attitude level, people care about their informational privacy and express this concern verbally. However, this does not mean that they are willing to go to any inconvenience to protect their privacy. 2) At level 2, privacy is a relevant issue for a person and is also taken into account in everyday life. This means that people use the data-protected options within services or systems that they use anyway (e.g., limiting privacy settings) without having to accept cuts in their lifestyle. 3) At level 3, the protection of informational privacy is part of the person's identity. Accordingly, people at this level are also willing to go new, sometimes costly ways to protect their privacy. 4) At the highest level, the protection of informational privacy is a personal life goal. Individuals at this level make fundamental life decisions based on the protection of their privacy and are willing to sacrifice a lot in their daily lives to protect their informational privacy. Furthermore, we test whether our instrument (i.e., the CIP) operates as a Rasch scale. We seek to replicate our findings regarding the scale's objectivity, reliability, and validity by investigating model fit, differential item functioning, and the relationship with an established measure of privacy concern. We additionally test whether people's commitment to informational privacy (assessed by the CIP) accounts for manifest behaviour (that is critical for goal attainment). |
