When Scales Fail to Measure Up: How Not to Measure Social Media Privacy--Findings of a Representative Survey in 16 Countries

Privacy scales are scientific instruments measuring constructs, such as users’ concerns, preferences, or behaviour; however, the development and validation of privacy scales are often limited to populations in the Global North. This poses a challenge for evaluating and generalising the scale results in the Global South. We present the results of a replication study on the external validity of the Privacy-Defensive Behaviour Scale (PDBS) with a representative sample of 8140 participants from 16 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. Our results show that the PDBS, when administered in the MENA region, has a poor model fit, does not support the factor structure of the original scale, and exhibits low reliability and validity. Our results highlight the need for cross-cultural scale validation and adaptation. We discuss possible underlying reasons and best practices for scale validation studies.