Investigating the relationship between anxiety and emotional intelligence with regard to online privacy

Abstract

This study was conducted as a relational screening model to investigate whether university students' anxiety and emotional intelligence levels with regard to online privacy are significantly related to various variables. The study group for this research consisted of 442 university students (147 females and 295 males) studying at Bursa Uludag University Faculty of Education in the 2017-2018 academic year. The data collection tools used included the Online Privacy Anxiety Scale, the Schutte Emotional Intelligence Scale-33-Tr, and the demographic information questionnaire. In order to investigate the differences in gender variables in our analyses, we used the Mann-Whitney U test with T-test. To analyze the variances in groups with more than two numbers, we used the Kruskal-Wallis test with one way variance analysis (ANOVA). Correlation analysis was performed using the Spearman Sequential Differences correlation analysis. As a result of the analysis of differentiation, we found that the level of anxiety for university students with regard to using e-mail was significantly different according to the comments on social media sharing and the changes in social life. We also found that the level of online trust anxiety was significantly different depending on the social recognition of the right people and age. We determined that the levels of emotional intelligence of university students were significantly different according to the variables of age and academic achievement perception. As a result of the correlation analyses, we found no significant relationship between university students' levels of emotional intelligence and anxiety with regard to online privacy.