Background
Recently Stuart and colleagues (2019) have argued that information privacy is an understudied topic in psychology. While philosophers in the domain of ethics of technology often talk of information privacy as a value (van de Poel, 2018; van den Hoven et al., 2020; Wildt et al., 2021), in psychology privacy has not yet been conceptualized as a value, with the exception of one yet unpunished study by Huijts that extended Schwartz and colleagues’ 19 value scale (e.g. Schwartz & Cieciuch, 2021) with privacy.
In this master research study, you can further develop and test a measure of information privacy as a value. You will conceptualize privacy as a value by extending the initial development of it and validate it by testing its relation with other safety related measurements such as risk aversion and with emotions, privacy-related concerns and behaviors in relation to digital technologies, if possible in more than 1 country.
Research questions
1. How can we conceptualize privacy as a value?
2. Does privacy as a value relate to other risk related measurements such as risk aversion?
3. Does privacy as a value explain emotions, perceived risks and behavior towards privacy-affecting technologies?
4. Can we replicate this in other countries?
Type of research
Survey research
Keywords
Privacy, values, smart devices, ICT
Information
If you are interested in this topic, please contact Steven Watson via s.j.watson@utwente.nl.
Literature
Schwartz, S. H., & Cieciuch, J. (2021). Measuring the Refined Theory of Individual Values in 49 Cultural Groups: Psychometrics of the Revised Portrait Value Questionnaire. Assessment, 107319112199876. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191121998760
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
van de Poel, I. (2018). Design for value change. Ethics and Information Technology 2018 23:1, 23(1), 27–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/S10676-018-9461-9
van den Hoven, J., Blaauw, M., Pieters, W., & Warnier, M. (2020). Privacy and Information Technology. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/it-privacy/
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