description
While information privacy has been considered an important value by philosophers (e.g. Wildt et al., 2021), and privacy is recognised as an important concept in psychology (Stuart et al., 2019), privacy has not yet been measured as a value in psychology. Indeed, the most commonly used value measurement in psychology, which contains 19 different values, does not (yet) include privacy as a value (e.g. Schwartz et al., 2017). The existing value measurement does include somewhat related values like personal security focusing on personal physical safety and wellbeing, societal security, focusing on the safety of one’s country, and face, focusing on one’s public image. However, these values are conceptually different from privacy. Privacy could arguably be a valuable addition to this list of protection-related values, as it could explain various decision making such as about data sharing with digital devices.
Values have been defined as “transsituational goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in the life of a person or other social entity” (p.21, Schwartz, 1994), which arguably also could apply to privacy. In the broadest sense, privacy concerns both physical privacy, which one practises for example when closing the door before changing ones clothes, but also concerns information privacy, related to limiting the sharing of data online. A first study on measuring privacy as a value has shown - on data gathered in the UK- that three dimensions of privacy as a value can be distinguished: information privacy, observational privacy and social privacy can be distinguished.
In this research project, you will test whether these dimensions of privacy as a value can also be distinguished in other countries/languages and whether they are predictive of specific privacy related behaviours, such as sharing data with smart devices, sharing personal information on social media, or talking with close others in public while other people can hear it, and under which conditions.
Research question
- Can we reliably measure multiple dimensions of privacy as a value?
- Do different dimensions of privacy as a value explain relevant privacy-related behaviours, and under which conditions?
Research method
The research questions are addressed in a survey study
Data-analysis
The data of this study will be analysed by quantitative data analysis programmes such as SPSS or R.
INFORMATION
Please contact Lynn Weiher (l.weiher@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to three students.
Literature
Burgoon, J. K. (1982). Privacy and Communication. Annals of the International Communication Association. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.1982.11678499
Schwartz, S. H. (1994). Are There Universal Aspects in the Structure and Contents of Human Values? Journal of Social Issues, 50(4), 19–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1540-4560.1994.TB01196.X
Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Torres, C., Dirilen-Gumus, O., & Butenko, T. (2017). Value tradeoffs propel and inhibit behavior: Validating the 19 refined values in four countries. European Journal of Social Psychology, 47(3), 241–258. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2228
Stuart, A., Bandara, A. K., & Levine, M. (2019). The psychology of privacy in the digital age. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(11). https://doi.org/10.1111/SPC3.12507
Wildt, T. E. de, Poel, I. R. van de, & Chappin, E. J. L. (2021). Tracing Long-term Value Change in (Energy) Technologies: Opportunities of Probabilistic Topic Models Using Large Data Sets: Https://Doi.Org/10.1177/01622439211054439, 016224392110544. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211054439