Perception of Risk and Online Practices: An Inductive Approach to Understanding the Information Behaviour Paradox

People’s concerns about risks online and how they actually behave online do not always match up, this is often referred to as a personal information behaviour paradox. We look to a dataset of 101 people in East York, Toronto to identify factors that influence perceptions of online risk and behavioural responses to those perceptions in order to better understand this paradox. Our findings suggest that: 1) self-reported internet skills do not seem to be related to whether our respondents are concerned with online risks; 2) perception of online risk, self-reported internet skills, as well as hearing about other people’s negative online experiences are related to how our respondents are protecting themselves online; 3) although having concerns about online risks or hearing about someone else’s negative online experiences do not seem to be related to whether they prefer to store certain information online, self-reported internet skills do play a role. Furthermore, we use latent class analysis to identify three distinct classes of internet users in our sample who differ in their perception of online risks, self-reported internet skills, as well as their behavioural responses to third party negative online experiences.