Abstract:

The use of the Internet is increasing day by day by people, especially among the students, and most of the time this affects the students negatively. Hence, this research is aimed to investigate university students’ self-efficacy in the safe use of the Internet. Research based model and scale was used in the study where data were collected from 709 randomly chosen volunteered students. A scale named “The scale for the self-efficacy and perceptions in the safe use of the Internet” adapted by Cavus and Ercag (2016), was used to collect data in the study. The scale consisted of four dimensions with 35 items: Social networking sites, malicious software, web security and social engineering, and computer security. Descriptive statistics, frequency, percentage, one-way ANOVA and independent t-test were used to analyze the collected data. After statistical analysis of the collected data, the disheartened result was found that university students’ self-efficacy in the safe use of the Internet is not enough to protect themselves from harmful aspects of the Internet. There were also significant differences found in the overall mean average score of university students’ self-efficacy in the safe use of the internet between gender and age. From this study, it could be deduced that the results of the study will be valuable to students, parents and most probably to the people engaged in research at the government offices or at universities. By knowing the possible weakness of students’ self-efficacy in the safe use of the Internet issues, appropriate solutions can be proposed to will help salvage this problem.

Keywords:

Internet security, computer security, students, self-efficacy, Internet.