From Contextualizing to Context Theorizing: Assessing Context Effects in Privacy Research
指出隐私研究缺乏情境理论化导致结论难以推广，提出了一个概念框架和方法工具来评估情境如何影响隐私关注，帮助研究者选择情境变量以加速形成情境权变理论。
Over the past two decades, behavioral research in privacy has made considerable progress transitioning from acontextual studies to using contextualization as a powerful sensitizing device for illuminating the boundary conditions of privacy theories. Significant challenges and opportunities wait, however, on elevating and converging individually contextualized studies to a context-contingent theory that explicates the mechanisms through which contexts influence consumers’ privacy concerns and their behavioral reactions. This paper identifies the important barriers occasioned by this lack of context theorizing on the generalizability of privacy research findings and argues for accelerating the transition from the contextualization of individual research studies to an integrative understanding of context effects on privacy concerns. It also takes a first step toward this goal by providing a conceptual framework and the associated methodological instantiation for assessing how context-oriented nuances influence privacy concerns. Empirical evidence demonstrates the value of the framework as a diagnostic device guiding the selection of contextual contingencies in future research, so as to advance the pace of convergence toward context-contingent theories in information privacy. This paper was accepted by Anindya Ghose, information systems.