Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

5.4
 
Data collection 
5.4.1
 
Primary data collection procedure 
The primary data collection tools were questionnaires; however, these questionnaires 
were given online. A respondent accessed the questionnaire through a link and filled it online 
and submitted his/her responses online. The advantage of this is that the data collection 
process was made less costly since there was no printing, copying, and distribution cost 
incurred. Also, the responses were easier to process since there was no conversion process 
from data on hard copies to become a soft copy. The coverage was also better since the 

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online-based questionnaires could be filled from any web browser, that is, on both desktops 
and mobile phones.
The targeted respondents for this questionnaire were people in the age bracket of 18 to 
45 years. There are many people in the world within this bracket that are active on social 
media. Therefore, the respondents had to be sampled to come up with just an adequate 
number. The research targeted to get well over 200 responses, and thus the sample size was 
made to 250 respondents. Over 100 responses were considered to be adequate as the research 
was intended to be qualitative rather than quantitative. The online questionnaire contained 80 
questions, and it was estimated that respondents would take between 20 to 30 minutes to give 
their responses. Prior to the questionnaire being sent, invitations for interested respondents 
were sent via email to persons in different social media groups. Within the first 2 weeks, 300 
people volunteered to take the online survey/questionnaire. This group of respondents was 
made up of people from different genders, ages, location, and education level, thus was 
considered more or less ideal for the study. From the 300 volunteers, the questionnaire links 
were sent to 250 via several media. The questionnaire tried as much as possible to respect the 
privacy of the respondents and thus no personally identifiable information was requested for. 
As such, all submissions made were anonymous since they did not contain the respondents’ 
names, email addresses, postal addresses, social media accounts, or phone numbers. 
However, there were some mandatory fields that respondents were required to fill such as 
their age and gender; this was solely for the purpose of analysis. 
The following Table 1 shows the breakdown of the types of respondents that were 
able to answer and submit the questionnaire in time. The total number of valid responses 
within the given time was 110. 

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Table 1: Shows the breakdown of the types of respondents