Cyber4Dev-Q: Calibrating cyber awareness in the developing country context

Abstract

Citizens of the hyper-connected world face tremendous challenges in managing their personal online risks; that is to preserve their cyber safety, cyber security and cyber privacy. Governments allocate significant resources to raising awareness about these three areas among their citizens to equip them to manage their online risks. To ensure maximum efficacy, these endeavours must be able to gauge existing levels of awareness to ensure that awareness-creation drives target population-level awareness gaps. A number of excellent and rigorously developed questionnaires exist for this purpose. However, these may not be as accurate in revealing awareness gaps and issues in developing countries. Developing country citizens face a range of context-specific challenges, distinct from those faced by developed country citizens. These are likely to impact their cyber awareness development and maintenance. A context-sensitive cyber awareness measurement instrument designed for such a context has a better chance of revealing particular awareness aspects requiring attention. To meet this need, we developed and validated a cyber awareness questionnaire, the cyber awareness calibration instrument for developing countries (Cyber4Dev-Q), for use in developing countries to measure the cyber awareness of their citizens in all three core cyber areas in a context-sensitive fashion.