Project Scope

This cluster of projects in the Carnegie Mellon HCII department, led by Laura Dabbish and Jason Hong, is focused on leveraging human factors and social psychology to develop interventions and strategies to encourage adoption of security behavior. My work on the project was with graduate student Cori Faklaris on her dissertation project, developing a stage model of cybersecurity adoption, using stage models and value-expectancy models from economics, health behavior, and diffusion of innovations to conceptualize how people adopt security practices and behaviors. I became involved with her work from June 2021-August 2021 during the Summer REU program sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and helped clean and analyze interviews conducted that spring.

Process

The interviews I worked with were conducted over Zoom, and asked participants about the social influences and other factors impacting their adoption or non-adoption of various cybersecurity practices. After cleaning the transcripts and importing them into qualitative analysis tool MAXQDA, Cori and I worked together to develop a codebook that would capture high-level ideas like social influences, stages of adoption, and security attitudes. We split this codebook and each coded all 17 interviews, before working mostly independently on our own research questions, adding more codes and subcodes as neccessary.

Throughout the summer, I conducted literature review on many different psychology and security topics to identify relevant research questions to guide my analysis, particularly Sauvik Das' extensive research on social influences in behavior adoption and Roger's theory of Diffusion of Innovations. I used MAXQDA's tools for code coverage, code matrices, and visual tools, as well as my own summarizing, diagramming, and feedback from my mentors, to develop support for my final research contribution.

My final poster, which I presented during a virtual poster session for all interns in August 2021, centered on attitudes of resistance towards security practice, and the patterns displayed in these attitudes during the interviews, as well as the social influence I saw impacting resistance. I tied this back to Cori's central goal of developing a stage model for security adoption by detailing the ways that resistance attitudes could be present at all stages of awareness, learning, and adoption.