Cybercrime risk perception and preventive awareness among Vietnamese university students: The roles of social media, legal awareness, media influence, and education

  • 9 Views
  • 0 Downloads

Creative Commons License DMCA.com Protection Status
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Type of the article: Research Article

Cybercrime is an increasingly visible digital safety concern for young adults in Vietnam, particularly for university students who rely heavily on social media for communication, learning, and risk-related information. This cross-sectional study examines the associations between social media use, legal awareness of cybercrime, media influence and misinformation exposure, family-school education, personal safety anxiety, and cybercrime risk perception and preventive awareness. Data were collected from 746 adult respondents in Vietnam, almost all of them were undergraduate students aged 18-24, and analyzed using EFA, CFA, CB-SEM, and bootstrap resampling. The results indicate that personal safety anxiety is the strongest correlate of cybercrime risk perception and preventive awareness. Family-school education, legal awareness, media influence and misinformation exposure, and social media use are also positively associated with both anxiety and the outcome construct. Indirect associations through personal safety anxiety were observed for all four antecedents, with the strongest indirect association involving family-school education. The findings should be interpreted as associational rather than causal because the data are cross-sectional and self-reported. The study contributes to socio-legal and communication research by showing how informational, legal, educational, and emotional factors jointly relate to cybercrime-related awareness among Vietnamese university students.

view full abstract hide full abstract
    • Figure 1. Conceptual model and hypothesized direct and indirect pathways
    • Figure 2. Standardized confirmatory factor analysis results
    • Figure 3. Structural equation model results from AMOS
    • Table 1. Respondent characteristics (N = 746)
    • Table 2. Frequently used social media platforms
    • Table 3. Measurement structure of the questionnaire
    • Table 4. Descriptive statistics of selected observed variables
    • Table 5. Internal consistency of measurement scales
    • Table 6. Exploratory factor analysis results
    • Table 7. CFA model fit and convergent validity
    • Table 8. Discriminant validity matrix (reported coefficients)
    • Table 9. Structural paths and explained variance
    • Table 10. Indirect associations through personal safety anxiety
    • Table 11. Multi-group analysis by gender
    • Table A1. Questionnaire items used in the survey
    • Table B1. Standardized CFA loadings
    • Conceptualization
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Data curation
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Formal Analysis
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Funding acquisition
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Investigation
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Methodology
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Project administration
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Resources
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Software
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Supervision
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Validation
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Visualization
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Writing – original draft
      Thanh Thao Phung
    • Writing – review & editing
      Thanh Thao Phung