Poster #75 - For Me or For Us? Cultural Orientations and Compliance with Government Data Access in Disaster Response

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korean authorities mandated location tracking and personal data disclosure as part of disaster response efforts — measures that citizens largely accepted in the name of public safety. However, in societies shaped by different cultural and normative orientations, such measures would likely face far greater public resistance, as individual privacy tends to be more strongly guarded against government reach. While prioritizing public safety often justifies government access to personal data, such expansion also raises privacy concerns, making public compliance a critical condition for effective disaster response.This study examines how citizens' compliance intentions with government access to personal data in disaster context are shaped by cultural orientations and normative priorities. Specifically, we investigate how cultural orientations between individualism and collectivism, as well as individuals’ prioritization between privacy and collective safety influence both citizens’ general support for data use and willingness to provide personal information. To test these relationships, we analyze data from a nationally representative survey of 1,094 adults in South Korea and estimate ordered logit models. We also incorporate key institutional explanatory factors, including perceived procedural fairness, trust in disaster response organizations, and perceived efficacy of data use, while controlling for perceived risk of data breaches, experience of privacy violations, knowledge of data use, privacy knowledge, gender, age, and subjective socioeconomic status. The preliminary results show that individualism is positively associated with both general support and citizen willingness. In contrast, the effects of collectivism are more limited and inconsistent across models. In addition, individuals who prioritize collective safety over privacy are more likely to support government data collection and to share personal information. These findings suggest that public acceptance is not primarily driven by collectivist orientations per se, but rather by how individuals interpret and justify normative trade-offs under conditions of risk. Institutional factors such as perceived procedural fairness, trust in disaster response organizations, and perceived efficacy of data use also show positive and statistically significant associations across models. These findings highlight the importance of jointly considering cultural and institutional factors in understanding public acceptance of disaster data governance. Notably, acceptance remains uneven even under conditions of heightened risk, suggesting that crisis contexts do not uniformly override individual differences in attitudes toward data use. Therefore, policies aimed at enhancing data-driven disaster response should account for how citizens interpret the use of personal data within broader value frameworks.

Authors

• Gabeen Lee, University at Albany
  Presenting Author

• Jeongmin Oh, Hanyang University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Junghwa Choi, University of Nebraska-Omaha
  Non-Presenting Co-Author