Toward a Security Behavior Intentions Scale Robust to Linguistic Differences

Copyright is held by the author/owner. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee. Poster presented at the 12th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2016), June 22-24, 2016, Denver CO. Abstract We are interested in understanding how cultural differences impact people’s attitudes toward security. As a first, preliminary, step toward this goal, we translated Egelman and Peer’s Security Behavior Intention Scale (SeBIS) into Japanese, to determine whether general attitudes and behaviors could be replicated in Japanese. Through a pilot study of 1,654 Japanese-speaking users we discovered that the model construct previously reported was no longer valid. We found these inconsistencies were caused by (a) negative interrogative sentences and (b) questions which led to ambiguous translations. Using a couple of simple modifications, we propose a revised SeBIS questionnaire to attempt to correct both factors. We tested the revised scale on a new cohort of Japanese and English speaking participants. Our results suggest that the revised scale is robust to linguistic differences, albeit with different outcomes across cultures.