Lifestyles and routine activities: Do they enable different types of cyber abuse?

an article by Zarina I. Vakhitova (Monash University, Victoria, Australia), Clair L. Alston-Knox (AutoStat Institute and Predictive Analytics Group, Australia) and Danielle M. Reynald, Michael K. Townsley and Julianne L. Webster (Griffith University, Queensland, Australia) published in Computers in Human Behavior Volume 101 (December 2019)

HIghlights

• Lifestyle-routine activity theory appears useful for understanding different types of cyber abuse victimisation.
• Non-victims tend to be less involved in risky activities.
• Proximity to offenders measured as online gaming is most consistently associated with cyber abuse.
• Direct abuse is associated with less involvement in risky activities compared with indirect cyber abuse.

Abstract

Background
The emergence of new technology-facilitated types of crime following the advent of the Internet necessitated the re-examination of the utility of traditional theories such as lifestyle-routine activity theory to explain crimes that occur in the new and unique environment of cyberspace.

Reason for study
The objective of this study was to investigate whether victims’ lifestyles and routine activities can help explain the risk of victimisation from direct, indirect and mixed types of cyber abuse.

Research design
To achieve this objective, the data from a large nationwide (US) crowd-sourced sample (N = 1463) of adult members of an online labour portal Mechanical Turk was collected using an online survey platform Qualtrics and then analysed using Bayesian Profile Regression to identify clusters of lifestyles and routine activities of victims associated with victimisation from different types of cyber abuse.

Findings
Our analyses were able to distinguish between victims and non-victims as well as between victims of different sub-classifications of cyber abuse. Specifically, we have identified five population subgroups based on their lifestyles and routine activities in terms of the associated risk of personal victimisation from different types of cyber abuse. This paper discusses the differences in lifestyles and routine activities between the identified groups.

Conclusions
Our findings generally support the empirical utility of lifestyle-routine activity theory to explain cyber abuse victimisation; as with other traditional types of crime (e.g. robbery or assault), victims’ lifestyles and routine activities play a significant role in their risk of various types of cyber abuse victimisation.

Labels:
cyber_abuse, lifestyle-routine_activity_theory, Bayesian_profile_regression, victimisation,

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