Information sharing concern on social media: A scale development study

It is observed that there are insufficient studies to measure the concerns of users about the privacy of personal data they share while attending or using social media. The aim of this research is to develop a valid and reliable measurement tool that will quantitively evaluate the personal data sharing concern on social media, which is becoming more and more popular, can cause in users. The developed scale is prepared with the literature review including social media usage, online privacy concerns, online data privacy concerns, and anxiety models. Firstly, an item pool that contains variety of information sharing concern on social media is prepared. Secondly, the content validity of these items is provided with an expert team that was asked their opinion. After that, in order to test face validity, items with content validity were applied to 20 people. As a result of this pilot study, Cronbach alpha is found to be 0.85. Lastly, 26 items with content and face validity, a scale, which is named as Information Sharing Concern on Social Media Scale (ISCSM)is created. This scale collects information about social media users' concerns about their use on social media, their concerns about sharing their personal data on social media. In order to test the research questions of interest, ISCSM and Online Privacy Concern Scale (OPCS) are applied to 325 participants, which are adult men and women between the age of 18 and 65, live in Turkey. After eliminating nine items, EFA showed that the scale had one factor structure. CFA verified the one factor structure. After, test re-test method, parallel-forms method and Cronbach's Alpha (.91) internal consistency reliability analyzes are conducted. These results show that this scale is a valid and reliable assessment tool to measure information concerns regarding information sharing in social media.