Exploring the Nature of Security Awareness: a Philosophical Perspective

Security awareness is acknowledged as one of the true culprits in many failures in information security management, yet very limited amount of literature has explored the nature of security awareness. Although few studies have proposed guidelines of how to study and measure it, the power of those approaches appears to be inherently limited. To fill such gaps, the objectives of this paper are (1) to explore the nature of security awareness based on the theory of learning outcomes, (2) to develop a philosophical conceptualization of security awareness based on the philosophy of scientific realism, and (3) to suggest that multiple methodologies help researchers learn better the nature of security awareness. By resorting to scientific realism, this paper not only provides a richer understanding of the multidimensional nature of security awareness, but points out that researchers should triangulate multiple methodologies to study it. In addition, the application of scientific realism in this paper should alleviate the incorrigible debates around the polarization of positivism and antipositivism in the field.