UNDERSTANDING USERS’ INFORMATION PRIVACY BEHAVIORS: THE ROLE OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays. The primary purpose of this dissertation is to provide an understanding of the relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behaviors, focusing on the role of negative emotions in diverse contexts with various methodologies. The first essay explores the mediating role of negative emotions in the context of location-based services. Based on a laddering interview, I examine 57 location-based users’ understandings of negative emotions in the relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. The findings demonstrated three types of negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, and disappointment in the relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behaviors in the context of location-based services. The first essay also suggested the mediating role of the negative emotions between privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. The second essay examines how negative emotions mediate the relationship between privacy concerns and privacy behaviors in the context of smart speakers. Based on the stimuli-organisms-responses theory, the second essay surveyed 359 smart speaker users to confirm the relationships among privacy concerns, negative emotions, and privacy behaviors. Using structural equation modeling, the findings provide empirical evidence of the mediating role of negative emotions between privacy concerns and privacy behaviors, as well as the relationships among privacy concerns, negative emotions, and privacy behaviors. In the third essay, I extend the existing literature to identify the mediating role of negative emotions in the relationship between risk type and coping behaviors. Specifically, the third essay focuses on the comparison of two risk types, including financial risk and privacy risk, thus, I chose information breach cases according to the leaked information, including financial and privacy information. To understand the mediating effect of negative emotions, the third essay adopted a text mining approach which included sentiment analysis, content analysis, and logistic regression, based on a total of 63,038 Twitter mentions when personal information leakage accidents occurred. The results show that risk type has a significant influence on negative emotions and private privacy actions. Moreover, the results indicate the mediating effect of negative emotion between risk type and coping behavior. This dissertation contributes to improving our understanding of information privacy and behavior privacy by revealing the mediating role of negative emotion and suggesting the cognitive-emotional privacy model. Implications for service providers handling customer data are also identified. Another contribution of this dissertation is to provide generalizable knowledge about the relationships among privacy concern, negative emotion, and privacy behavior with diverse contexts and methodological approaches.