Loading...
Investigation of Privacy within Health Marketing, Digital Activism, and International Contexts
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract
Privacy, which has a long history of academic inquiry across multiple disciplines, is critically important to modern marketing. Advances in digital information technologies have allowed marketers to provide personalized services to consumers at the cost of their privacy. However, as new technologies increase privacy tensions across all facets of life, so does the need for situational scholarship on privacy. This dissertation uses a variety of datasets, theories, and analytical methods to examine three important privacy contexts: healthcare (industry), activists (actors), and countries (nations). Essay 1 draws on justice theory to examine the role of fairness in consumers’ decision to use health information technologies (HIT). Using data from a nationally representative sample (n = 442), structural equation models (SEM) show that knowledge of technology and of regulations can offset the negative effect of privacy concerns on consumers’ decision to use HIT by increasing fairness perceptions. Using large datasets from Reddit (n = 186,678) and Twitter (n = 922,095), Essay 2 takes a multi-method approach (text mining, linear mixed-effects regression) to examine the culture of digital privacy activists and the impact that their sentiments have on the overall marketplace, thereby testing the theory of marketplace sentiments. Additionally, this essay proposes and validates a new linguistic dictionary creation process. Essay 3 draws on the contextual integrity, self-concept, and international marketing literatures to investigate the antecedents and consequences of meeting informational, temporal, and spatial privacy expectations around the world. Hierarchical regressions, MANOVA, and multi-group SEM are used to analyze survey data from the US, UK, India, and South Africa (n = 1,657) and find that meeting privacy expectations is a function of both consumers (individual-self vs. social-self) and country (developed vs. developing) contexts. Together, these three essays contribute to the privacy literature by identifying perceived justice as a key construct in healthcare exchanges, examining digital privacy activists and their effect on the overall marketplace, and investigating how the determinants and outcomes of MPE vary internationally. Managerial and public policy implications are discussed throughout.
Type
Dissertation (Open Access)
Date
2023-05
Publisher
Degree
License
Attribution 4.0 International
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/