Information disclosure decisions often have impacts beyond just the person who made the decision to share the information. This is especially true for family members, where one family member's decision to share information can result in a privacy breach that affects the entire family. However, few studies have examined information disclosure decisions when more than one person is affected. This research uses a latent profile analysis of parent-teen dyads to understand collective information disclosure decisions via the use of technology that may affect the entire family. To conduct the study, we surveyed dyads of a parent and a related teenager at two points in time regarding their perceptions and intentions to share information via an app that may affect other family members, including those outside the dyad. The latent profile analysis revealed two types of parent-teen dyads: technology-resistant and technology-receptive. We conceptualise these empirically derived privacy profiles as relational orientations toward collective privacy, demonstrating how latent profiles can be theoretically interpreted as outcomes of ongoing social and relational processes within dyads. We highlight how future research can leverage latent profile analysis to obtain a deeper understanding of dyadic-level decisions, such as information disclosure.

Prior research on fitness technologies has identified numerous affordances that support users’ fitness goals. However, these affordances are often conceptualized as perceived action possibilities and described using inconsistent labels across studies, resulting in fragmented constructs and limited cumulative theorizing. Affordance actualization theory suggests that technological affordances have consequences only when enacted through users’ actions. Yet empirical measures capturing such enactments remain underdeveloped. To address this gap, we developed and validated a measurement scale for actualized fitness technology affordances. Following established scale development procedures, we generated items, refined the scale, and assessed reliability and validity through three rounds of data collection across student, MTurk, and Prolific samples. The resulting four-factor, 18-item scale captured distinct patterns of actualized affordances—self-appraisal, social appraisal, rewarding, and reminding—reflecting recurring, goal-directed actions performed through fitness technologies in practice. We found that the validated instrument extended the explanatory value of affordance actualization theory in fitness technology research and established a foundation for examining how enacted behaviors relate to user experiences, identities, and downstream outcomes across digital health contexts.

This study explores how fitness technologies support users in achieving their fitness goals. As performing fitness activities is an intermediate process related to the realization of fitness goals, it is essential to understand how fitness technologies facilitate users' exercise experience. To that end, this study draws on affordance actualization theory and the concept of exercise engagement to develop and empirically test a model measuring the impact of four actualized affordances on users' cognitive and emotional engagement in fitness activities, and subsequently on their fitness goal attainment. Data from two survey waves involving 221 matched responses were analyzed using CB-SEM. The results indicate that while fitness technologies embed multiple features, users predominantly actualized four key affordances-self-appraisal, social appraisal, rewarding, and reminding. Among these, self-appraisal and social appraisal affordances significantly enhance emotional exercise engagement, which in turn has a positive effect on fitness goal achievement. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting the importance of actualized affordances in fitness technology use context, focusing on how specific actualized affordances foster emotional exercise engagement, a critical driver of goal attainment. By integrating the affordance actualization theory with exercise engagement, this research provides new insights into how fitness technologies can effectively support users' fitness journeys.

Customer ratings highly influence purchasing decisions on sharing economy platforms. Despite extensive research on the impact of ratings, limited attention has been given to the presentation formats of ratings - such as graphical versus numerical representations - influencing users' purchasing decisions. Thus, this study examines the impact of two different information representation formats on users' purchasing decisions. According to cognitive fit theory, different information representation formats may influence decision-making based on whether the format matches the cognitive process involved. Sharing economy platforms that utilise ratings as a graphical representation, i.e. stars, are believed to be a cognitive misfit in the purchasing decision. The user's task when interpreting a rating is to specify a value, and graphics may result in a misinterpretation of the actual value. We conducted an online factorial experiment with Airbnb and UrbanSitter contexts, yielding 222 responses. Findings suggest that when ratings are presented numerically and a positive difference is observed, users are more likely to transact in both low- and high-risk settings. This effect is removed when the rating is presented graphically in a high-risk setting. This study offers insights into rating design on sharing economy platforms, aiming to prevent degradation in decision quality resulting from cognitively misfit design choices.

Organizations worldwide face critical concerns related to cybersecurity threats and information security policy (ISP) compliance. Even though humans are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain, information security professionals understand the importance of promoting individual information security behaviors because employees are also the first line of defense against ever-increasing cyber threats. Despite a recent trend of working from home, organizations do not make significant differences in their information security interventions for remote workers, relying mainly on VPNs as the only used tool, essentially making employees follow in-office standard information security policies because they are “virtually in-office.” Our study suggests that organizations need to recognize the unique context of remote work and consider personal motivations when shaping information security practices. Furthermore, our study indicates that in order to motivate remote employees to follow secure information security practices, organizations should consider personal characteristics instead of focusing on generic interventions. For instance, our study compares onsite and remote workers, suggesting that personal values are more relevant in remote work settings. Our findings exemplify just one of the many potential personal characteristics to be considered, highlighting how personal values are important motivators for ISP compliance and how they differ for onsite and remote workers in their importance when following information security rules.

Objective: To understand how parents and adolescents perceive the major family problems they faced during a global pandemic, focusing on implications for family resilience. Background: Families are challenged by the upheaval in contemporary life due to a global health pandemic and unrelenting changes to work, school, civic, and home routines. Family resilience theory guided our understanding of how families perceive and understand the problems they faced during a major disruption in their lives. Method: A diverse sample of parent-adolescent pairs was surveyed at two points in time. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze open-ended questions asking about family members' perceptions of the major problems they faced as a family during the pandemic. Results: Most participants reported a major family problem during the pandemic (e.g., unemployment, online learning, isolation, fear of COVID-19), with financial issues being the most prevalent problem. Parents were more likely to identify a major family tension, compared with adolescents, who were more likely to say they were unaware of any major family problems. Conclusion: Parents and adolescents reported substantial family stress and tension, especially around financial strain and social isolation, indicating their heightened awareness of the new risks they were facing. Both parents and adolescents also described a willingness to pull together on behalf of family well-being and adaptation. Implications: Support mechanisms through public policy and from family life practitioners can help families navigate pandemic-related stressors, assess adverse events in adolescence, promote new pathways in navigating disrupted routines, and enhance family resilience.

Information privacy studies regularly measure people's intention to disclose information with holistic (general) or analytic (specific) measures. As researchers have endeavored to uncover differences in findings within privacy-related research, the nature of this measure has not been considered. This work demonstrates the differences in findings when intentions are measured holistically vs. analytically. We surveyed participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk and showed that measuring intentions analytically or holistically influences the results found. Overall, our study demonstrates the importance of measuring disclosure intentions analytically to better understand the factors that influence information disclosure. We discuss how these measurement decisions can influence future privacy research.

Fake news, propagated on social media platforms, is regularly used as a tool to influence political beliefs. In this paper, we investigate the impact of fake news on perceptions of election processes by drawing on the theory of motivated reasoning. We use survey data on partisan alignment, news consumption habits, and voting methods collected before and after the 2020 United States general election. Our pre-election results indicated that political alignment and the type of news a voter consumes influences their trust perceptions of election processes. These findings were replicated in the post-election results. We also found that Facebook users were more likely to consume fake and hyper-partisan news, whereas people who directly navigate to news websites consume primarily mainstream news sources. Implications for research and policy are discussed along with opportunities for future research on the impacts of fake news.

Organizations need to consider different managerial approaches to motivate security compliance behavior as more employees work outside of the office. This study examines two approaches for motivating security compliance behaviors in a changing work environment. We examine protection motivation and stewardship-based strategic approaches to determine their effectiveness towards influencing information security behaviors. Independently, each approach has received demonstrable evidence of contributing to organizational behaviors. However, as the nature of work changes (e.g., hoteling, traveling, working from home), it also changes the security risk landscape for organizations, rendering the effectiveness of previous security controls debatable. This study contends there is value to management in integrating both protection motivation and stewardship approaches in this context. A research model is developed that integrates both approaches; protection motivation and stewardship concepts. We find that constructs consistent with protection motivation theory are more likely to explain decreases in security policy violations than stewardship theory. Further, by combining protection motivation and stewardship perspectives, this study's results supplement our understanding of security policy violations in a changing work environment. We show that the two together account for 51 percent of the variance, and thus both have value. Our findings suggest that a PMT-based strategy is a stronger approach for influencing compliance behavior. Therefore, it is important for organizations to continue focusing their efforts on threat communications as well as enhancing employees' abilities to respond. However, we also show that organizations should build a sense of belonging with their employees such that their employees become stewards of the organization's resources.

To realize desired health returns, fitness technology providers, users, and corporate wellness program managers need to understand how individuals’ different uses of fitness technologies influence their fitness experience and fitness goal achievements. Thus, this study draws on the theory of affordances and the concept of engagement to develop and empirically test a model of fitness technology use as goal-directed behavior. Doing so highlights the relationship between trying to use fitness technologies and trying to perform fitness activities with fitness goal attainment. Our results show that while actualized self-appraisal affordance amplifies users’ cognitive exercise engagement, cognitive exercise engagement does not significantly influence fitness goal attainment. Furthermore, actualized self-appraisal and social appraisal affordances enhance users’ emotional exercise engagement, positively influencing fitness goal attainment. Thus, facilitating the actualization of self-appraisal and social appraisal affordances that increase individuals’ emotional exercise engagement is essential to the effective use of fitness technologies.

A significant focus of behavioral security research has been on understanding employees’ motives for protecting sensitive assets. To date, theorizing efforts in this space have focused on appraisal processes and nomological models that are designed to capture the responses to the security threats articulated within fear appeals. Because fear appeals are persuasive messages used to generate a sense of urgency about a specific threat that influences protective information security behaviors, they are an important focus in behavioral security research. However, we suggest that theoretical guidance is needed to facilitate further research in this area. We argue that ultimately, fear appeals are treatments intended to serve as catalysts of behavioral change. Therefore, fear appeals should have rhetorical validity, which is a specialized form of ecological validity in which contextualization has been included to ensure that the language embedded in the stimulus is consistent with the threat environment and the expectations of its audience. The rhetorical validity of a fear appeal should account for its exigence, the audience, and any constraints that shape the presentation and reception of the discourse. Using the illustrative example of a well-known behavioral security theory, protection motivation theory, this study provides a framework for behavioral security scholars in designing fear appeals that have rhetorical validity.

Technology played a central role during the pandemic for communications and services.It was also touted as a potential solution to control the spread of COVID-19 via proximity tracing applications, also known as contact tracing (CT) apps worldwide.In non-mandated settings, however, these apps did not attain popularity.Privacy concerns were highlighted as one reason.We explored how family perceptions of CT apps can affect the family's use of such apps.We surveyed parent-teen dyads twice over a 5-month period.We analyzed parent-teen perceptions of each other's intentions and use of CT apps at time 1 and 2, exploring changes over time.Parents' use intentions were influenced by their and their teens' perceptions of the benefits but not privacy concerns.Teen intentions were influenced by their own perceptions of benefits, not their parent's, and their parent's concerns for the family.Intentions always influenced usage, including intentions at time 1 influencing use at time 2, demonstrating a longitudinal effect of intentions on usage existed for parents and teens.

This article builds a socio-technical dataset and associated network and provides exploratory analysis of a GitHub repository for a smartphone application used by the Elizabeth Warren campaign during the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucuses. It provides insights into the types of technology used by campaigns for tracking primary delegates and the social actors that have potential influence over those technologies. Results suggest that certain nodes in the network have more influence over the election technology and that security risks can manifest through the unique interaction between technical and social network components as supply chain attacks. The work sheds light on implications of how election technology is audited and designed, especially for potential public-facing voting technology. A metric for evaluating socio-technical vulnerability is also proposed.

Survey items developed in behavioral Information Security (InfoSec) research should be practically useful in identifying individuals who are likely to create risk by failing to comply with InfoSec guidance. The literature shows that attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions drive compliance behavior and has influenced the creation of a multitude of training programs focused on improving ones’ InfoSec behaviors. While automated controls and directly observable technical indicators are generally preferred by InfoSec practitioners, difficult-to-monitor user actions can still compromise the effectiveness of automatic controls. For example, despite prohibition, doubtful or skeptical employees often increase organizational risk by using the same password to authenticate corporate and external services. Analysis of network traffic or device configurations is unlikely to provide evidence of these vulnerabilities but responses to well-designed surveys might. Guided by the relatively new IPAM model, this study administered 96 survey items from the Behavioral InfoSec literature, across three separate points in time, to 217 respondents. Using systematic feature selection techniques, manageable subsets of 29, 20, and 15 items were identified and tested as predictors of non-compliance with security policy. The feature selection process validates IPAM's innovation in using nuanced self-efficacy and planning items across multiple time frames. Prediction models were trained using several ML algorithms. Practically useful levels of prediction accuracy were achieved with, for example, ensemble tree models identifying 69% of the riskiest individuals within the top 25% of the sample. The findings indicate the usefulness of psychometric items from the behavioral InfoSec in guiding training programs and other cybersecurity control activities and demonstrate that they are promising as additional inputs to AI models that monitor networks for security events.

With government and industry experiencing a critical shortage of trained cybersecurity professionals, organisations are spearheading various training programs to cultivate cybersecurity skills. With more people working from home and the existing cybersecurity staff shortages, cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting new and existing vulnerabilities by launching ubiquitous cyberattacks. This study focuses on how to close the gap in cybersecurity skills through interest cultivation and self‐determined motivation. Our study shows that situational interest (SI) in cybersecurity along with situational motivational determinants (i.e., perceived learning autonomy and perceived relatedness) engendered self‐determined motivation toward cybersecurity training. Consequently, self‐determined motivation facilitated actual learning behaviour. Meanwhile, individual interest in cybersecurity created positive moderating effects in the relationships between self‐determination and its key antecedents (i.e., perceived relatedness and situational interest). Based on these findings, we provide research implications accordingly.

Individuals are increasingly using personal Internet of Things (IoT) devices that digitize their day-to-day lives. Those devices, however, often require substantial personal information to generate their intended benefits. For example, fitness technologies collect health, sleep, personal, and a vast array of other information ubiquitously, creating possible privacy issues for the users when fitness technology platform providers store or share their information, whether users know this or not. To explore the role of privacy perceptions in the context of continued use of fitness technologies, this study collected data from 212 fitness tracker users. We find empirical support for the importance of privacy perceptions in a user's intention to continue to use their fitness tracker. More specifically, consistent with privacy calculus research, privacy concern is negatively related to willingness to disclose information while perceived benefit is positively related to it. As an extension to calculus variables, users' expectations towards the data sharing practices of organizations also influences their willingness to disclose information. Importantly, willingness to disclose information has a direct effect on continued use intentions but also moderates the relationship between perceived benefit and users' intentions to continue using a fitness tracker. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.

The security of organizations’ information resources is often threatened by employee non-compliance to security policy or negligence. Though technical and procedural controls for curtailing security violations and motivating secure behaviors have been explored in the literature, security violations persist. Given the significant influence individuals wield on the welfare of organizations’ security and the dynamic nature of security threats, we explore voluntary security behaviors through the mechanism of stewardship. Drawing from the stewardship and information security literature, we develop and test a stewardship model of voluntary security behaviors using a sample of 409 working individuals. The results show that organizational support and identification influence stewardship, which in turn affects voluntary security behaviors. Our findings have several theoretical and practical implications for increasing stewardship and voluntary security behaviors in the organization.

The information systems (IS) literature includes different perspectives, epistemologies, and research philosophies to explore phenomena at the intersection of technologies, information, people, organizations, and processes. As studies are replicated and knowledge accumulates, researchers can develop a more in-depth understanding of how their constructs of interest interact and affect each other. IS researchers have reported mixed findings in prior research as the phenomena change. In this paper, we discuss unstable phenomena in IS and argue that conflicting findings in a variety of domains might be the result of this instability. Using examples from IS security and word processing research streams, we examine the issues surrounding unstable phenomena using a punctuated equilibrium lens and suggest research strategies and a research framework to help researchers conduct studies in this challenging environment.

Despite concerns raised by security professionals, online voting is beginning to be used in some limited cases as a way for citizens to cast a ballot. In this research we investigate voter believability of election results conducted online as it relates to auditor source credibility and process design through an experimental scenario survey related to the 2020 United States election. Our results suggest source credibility of auditors is essential for voters to believe an election result where ballots are cast online. We also find a strong partisan effect on perceptions of source credibility and election results believability. Implications for research and practice are discussed as well as opportunities for future research.

Data breaches and cyber incidents are on the rise, and companies continually research new technologies to defend against attacks and protect customer data. The blockchain is a data store designed to promote data privacy, as well as transaction integrity. Enterprises in several industries, especially banking, have investigated the implementation of blockchain-based databases to replace centralised databases as one mechanism for protecting customers' data by separating transactional data from personally identifiable information. Despite the blockchain's privacy protections, consumers remain largely unaware of these benefits. Building on the Health Belief Model (HBM), we include privacy concerns and inertia as critical factors that influence consumers' perceptions of blockchain-based databases' benefits. Using a sample of 304 respondents, we test a theoretical model incorporating these factors. Our study results indicate threat severity, threat susceptibility, awareness, and inertia significantly influence the perceived benefits of blockchain, which has a significant positive influence on consumers' intention to switch to blockchain-based applications. Although consumers' comfort with the status quo of traditional banking mechanisms is a significant barrier to the realisation of blockchain banking applications benefits, additional awareness of consumer privacy protections can persuade customers to use the blockchain-based applications, especially if they exhibit heightened privacy concerns.