George Raywood-Burke

Human individual difference predictors in cyber-security: modelling cyber secure behaviour using an alternative scale method

“Target interventions to understand which kind of people are most at risk under what circumstances and therefore reduce the risk and nurture their strengths.”

Summary

• The current measurement of individual differences posed a limitation – Likert scales are restricted to defined landmark responses. Therefore, this study adopted an alternative method to measure individual differences: the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). This has the added benefit of increasing the data’s resolution and building a more accurate and valid picture of the relationship between individual differences and cyber secure behaviour. It has been found that the use of VAS for these measures is valid and reliable.

• Some individual differences measures were found to be significantly related to only specific groups of secure behaviour (e.g., Neuroticism and Device Securement). In contrast, others were significantly related to all kinds of cyber secure behaviour (e.g., impulsivity).

• For the next step, a full regression analysis will be run and include other potential predictors. A theoretical comparison between Likert and VAS will also be conducted to see if there are any differences in significant findings.

More about George

George Raywood-Burke is an Endeavr Wales funded Human Factors Cyber Psychology PhD Student. He works as part of the Human Factors Excellence Research Group (HuFEx) at Cardiff University and with the Airbus Accelerator in Human-Centric Cyber Security. His work focuses on investigating the significance of workload factors (e.g. time pressure, cognitive resource depletion, uncertainty) and their relationships with cybersecure behaviours.