Brief report: Improving the validity of assessments of adolescentsʹ feelings of privacy invasion

Studies of privacy invasion have relied on measures that combine items assessing adolescentsʹ feelings of privacy invasion with items assessing parentsʹ monitoring behaviors. Removing items assessing parentsʹ monitoring behaviors may improve the validity of assessments of privacy invasion. Data were collected from 163 adolescents (M age 13 years, 5 months; 47% female; 50% European American, non-Hispanic, 46% African American) and their mothers. A model specifying separate factors for privacy invasion and monitoring behavior fit adolescent-reported and parent-reported data significantly better than a single factor model. Although privacy invasion and monitoring behavior were positively associated, privacy invasion and monitoring behavior correlations were significantly different from one another across all ten variables reported by adolescents and across eight of the nine variables reported by mothers. The pattern of results strongly supports a recommendation for researchers to exclude items assessing monitoring behaviors to provide a more valid assessment of privacy invasion.