Privacy-needs in office environments : development of two behavior-based scales

In this paper, we develop two behavior-based privacy-need measures for office environments. These two new scales are designed as objective measures, since they try to avoid introspection. One scale assesses people's motivation to withdraw from social interaction (i.e., the Need-For-Privacy [NFP]) and the other the motivation to seek social exchange (i.e., the Need-For-Socializing [NFS]). Based on survey data from 204 bank employees, our newly-developed measures demonstrated reasonable reliabilities (> .70). Regarding construct validity, we found our NFP scale to overlap (R² > 25%) with an established NFP measure (Kaya & Weber, 2003) and a need-for-solitude instrument (Pedersen, 1988). The results also corroborate the fact that people's NFP and their NFS are relatively distinct motives (R² = 10%).