A Review of Measures of Disclosure Outcomes in the IS Privacy Literature

For twenty years, Information Systems (IS) researchers investigated privacy attitudes and disclosure outcomes, yet a full understanding of the privacy disclosure relationship has not been reached. In the current study, we argue that the lack of consensus regarding the privacy-disclosure relationship may stem, at least in part, from methodological shortcomings. We contend that variations in disclosure measurement practices may be responsible for ambiguous findings in the accumulated IS privacy research. We provide a preliminary review of the IS privacy literature from which we aim to build an initial foundation for recommendations regarding measures of disclosure outcomes. We identify four widely used measures of disclosure outcomes (i.e. intentional, breadth of, retrospective self-reports of, and actual disclosure) and discuss their methodological concerns. We conclude with a brief discussion on the methodology for the full review and recommendation for future research.