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The target for the quota sample was a minimum of 200 respondents and the quota matrix provided in Table 1 was realised. As stated before the sample was equal in size for gender, 100 males and 100 females as well as divided equally amongst the different ethnic groups. The age categories for the realised sample resulted in (52.5%) of respondents in the category 18-20 whilst the smallest (5.5%) fell in the age category 24 and above.
A self-administered questionnaire was issued by the researchers after the screening questions were asked and this resulted in 100% response rate. The second question wanted to know if the respondent was aware of privacy settings available on Facebook the results revealed that the majority (93.5%) of the respondents were aware of the privacy settings on Facebook and a small number (6.5%) of the respondents are not aware of these settings.
Table 2 presents the results for each of the items in the list of information disclosure measured providing the means, standard deviations and percentages for each items in the scale.
TABLE 2: RESULTS OF DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS FOR INFORMATION DISCLOSURE Sum
The results of this construct indicate high levels of information disclosure amongst Facebook users which is in line with previous research (Young & Quan-Haase, 2009: 265-272; Gross & Acquisti, 2005: 13; Tufekci 2008: 20-25) in terms of information disclosure. These results found that 12 of the 17 items included in the list indicated that more than 60% of the respondents disclose such information on their profile.
The majority (98.0%) of the respondents reported using their actual name (first name) in their profile and the majority (96.5%) also included their last name. A large number of the respondents disclosed their school name (90.5%), photo of their friends (93.5%) and photo of themselves (92.5%), birth date (91.5%), and the majority of respondents disclosed their gender (95.5%) and photos of their friends (96.1%). The information items with smaller results included blogs (10.5%), videos of self (16.0%), personal cell phone number (34.0%) and personal physical address (12.5%).
INFORMATION DISCLOSURE AND ONLINE PRIVACY CONCERNS AMONGST FACEBOOK USERS 1097