CPRN 2020: The Challenge of Measuring Privacy Across Contexts

The CPRN 2020 Online Conference will focus on digital privacy challenges while focusing on four themes:

- Conseptualizing Privacy and Capturing its Changing Nature Across Cultures
- The Challenge of Measuring Privacy Across Cultural and Political Context
- Cultural and Social Boundries Under Conditions of "Social Distancing"
- Privacy After Pandemic: Emerging Directions in Privacy Research

For each theme, we have prepared questions and challenges that we want to discuss with privacy scholars from around the world in a series of two-hour online live sessions as well as asynchronously on our site. For more information about CPRN 2020, Click here.
To the conference website, Click here.

In the second session we will discuss: The Challenge of Measuring Privacy Across Contexts

Conducting cross-cultural, comparative research poses numerous methodological challenges. Identifying differences between nations, cultures, and contexts requires consistent and parallized research designs, instruments, and procedures. In this session, we focus on three key areas:

1. How can we compare and measure national and cultural differences? What dimensions are important to consider when the goal is to understand between-culture differences in various privacy outcomes? Instead of comparing nations on the aggregate level, shall we aim to identify the societal structures, socio-demographic distributions, cultural values, historical developments, as well diverging technological developments that explain differences in privacy-related variables across cultures? 

2. How can methods be adapted to different cultural contexts? Comparative research requires instruments and methods that work and measure similarly in the investigated cultures. Challenges hence pertain to the translation of scales, measures, stimuli, codebooks, interview guidelines, and procedures. A particular challenge is to keep the meaning of concepts and items similar and thus comparable. 

3. How do approaches to research differ across cultures? Although our aim is to conduct cross-cultural research, we do acknowledge that researchers from different cultures may differ in how they approach research (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative, analytical vs. empirical…). In order to produce meaningful cross-cultural research, it is important to develop a common ground and approach to research. At the same time, an ethnocentric approach to this type of research is flawed from the start. Understanding and meaningfully integrating attempts to de-westernize, or to internationalize intercultural communication research inside the larger frame of the discipline itself, as well as critical inquiry into the nature of the cultural biais of socio-technical arrangements are an essential ingredient of any cross-cultural endeavour.