Development and Validation of the Online Privacy Literacy Scale (OPLIS)

Online privacy literacy has been regarded as an important antecedent of online privacy behavior. However, a scale measuring literacy is missing. Hence, the aim of this study was to develop and validate a comprehensive scale to measure online privacy literacy. Relevant dimensions of the concept were identified in a prior study using a qualitative content analysis (Trepte et at., 2015). Based on these findings, an initial item pool with 113 knowledge questions was used to develop a 20 -item scale, including four dimensions, that is, knowledge about (a) institutional practices, (b) technical aspects of data protection, (c) the data protection law, and (d) data protection strategies. The results from three consecutive studies suggest a bifactor structure, in which online privacy literacy is represented by the global factor. We tested the construct and criterion validity in a quota sample of German Internet users (N = 1 945): The global factor correlated positively with subjective privacy literacy and proved to be an adequate predictor of the implementation of data protection measures.