Developing a measure of online wellbeing and user trust

TL;DR

This paper introduces initial scales for measuring online wellbeing and trust, developed through workshops, aiming to understand their interrelation and inform user empowerment and system design.

Contribution

It presents the first development stage of two novel scales for assessing online wellbeing and trust, incorporating psychological, digital literacy, and trust factors.

Findings

Scales cover wellbeing, trust, digital literacy, and online activity.

Designed to explore how online experiences impact wellbeing.

Next step involves large-scale validation of the scales.

Abstract

This paper describes the first stage of the ongoing development of two scales to measure online wellbeing and trust, based on the results of a series of workshops with younger and older adults. The first, the Online Wellbeing Scale includes subscales covering both psychological, or eudaimonic, wellbeing and subjective, or hedonic, wellbeing, as well as digital literacy and online activity; the overall aim is to understand how a user's online experiences affect their wellbeing. The second scale, the Trust Index includes three subscales covering the importance of trust to the user, trusting beliefs, and contextual factors; the aim for this scale is to examine trust in online algorithm-driven systems. The scales will be used together to aid researchers in understanding how trust (or lack of trust) relates to overall wellbeing online. They will also contribute to the development of a suite of tools for empowering users to negotiate issues of trust online, as well as in designing guidelines for the inclusion of trust considerations in the development of online algorithm-driven systems. The next step is to release the prototype scales developed as a result of this pilot in a large online study in to validate the measures.