Factors Influencing College Students’ Use of Computer Security

Information systems administrators face a difficult balance between providing sufficient security to protect the organization’s computing resources while not inhibiting the appropriate use of these resources. Striking this balance is particularly difficult in higher education due to the diversity of computer uses and users. This is accentuated by one large, diverse user group, namely students. To facilitate striking such a balance, a better understanding of students’ motivations to use security measures is useful. A theoretically sound model linking student and system security characteristics to students’ security behaviors is developed and presented in this paper. The model is operationalized using student responses to a web-based questionnaire. The empirical results show that training to use security measures has no impact on students’ security behaviors while experience with security does. Furthermore, ease of security use positively impacts students’ security behaviors through security self-efficacy. The influence of peers has similar impacts through security outcome expectancy.