How to Survey#

One key technique for understanding and improving how human decision making affects information security and privacy is the gathering of self-reported data from users. This data is typically gathered via survey and interview studies, and serves to inform the broader security and privacy community about user needs, behaviors, and beliefs. The quality of this data, and the validity of subsequent research results, depends on the choices researchers make when designing their experiments.

In the following, we provide an overview of these best practices in the context of studying usability for security and privacy. Start with Questionnaire, then continue with Pre-testing and Sampling.

Pages#

• Questionnaire covers questionnaire writing, consent forms, and reusable question blocks.
• Survey Pre-testing covers cognitive interviews, think-aloud, probing questions, and web probing.
• Survey Sampling covers recruitment strategy and tradeoffs across common sampling methods.