Smartphone Security Behavioral Scale: A New Psychometric Measurement for Smartphone Security
This provides a tool for researchers and practitioners to assess smartphone security behaviors, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing scale to a new domain.
The authors tackled the lack of a measurement standard for smartphone security behaviors by developing a new 14-item psychometric scale, which they validated with 1011 participants and used to predict mental health issues with AUCs up to 75.8%.
Despite widespread use of smartphones, there is no measurement standard targeted at smartphone security behaviors. In this paper we translate a well-known cybersecurity behavioral scale into the smartphone domain and show that we can improve on this translation by following an established psychometrics approach surveying 1011 participants. We design a new 14-item Smartphone Security Behavioral Scale (SSBS) exhibiting high reliability and good fit to a two-component behavioural model based on technical versus social protection strategies. We then demonstrate how SSBS can be applied to measure the influence of mental health issues on smartphone security behavior intentions. We found significant correlations that predict SSBS profiles from three types of MHIs. Conversely, we are able to predict presence of MHIs using SSBS profiles.We obtain prediction AUCs of 72.1% for Internet addiction,75.8% for depression and 66.2% for insomnia.