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The purpose of this study is to uncover employee attitudes towards information security and to address the issue of social acceptability bias in information security research.

The study used personal construct psychology and repertory grids as the foundation for the study in a mixed-methods design. Data collection consisted of 11 in-depth interviews followed by a survey with 115 employee responses. The data from the interviews informed the design of the survey.

The results of the interviews identified a number of themes around individual responsibility for information security and the ability of individuals to contribute to information security. The survey demonstrated that those employees who thought the that organisation was driven by the need to protect information also thought that the risks were overstated and that their colleagues were overly cautious. Conversely, employees who thought that the organisation was driven by the need to optimise its use of information felt that the security risks were justified and that colleagues took too many risks.

The survey findings were not statistically significant, but by breaking the survey results down further across business areas, it was possible to see differences within groups of individuals within the organisation.

The literature review highlights the issue of social acceptability bias and the problem of uncovering weakly held attitudes. In this study, the use of repertory grids offers a way of addressing these issues.

In this chapter, we explore to what extent storylines about the internet and social media are absent or marginal in The Archers. In particular, we examine these storylines to better understand how the inhabitants of Ambridge interact online and how their online activities intersect with their real-world experiences. We compare what happens in The Archers with the moral panic that often characterises narratives of technology use and find a striking contrast that we argue supports a broader way of understanding and characterising practices of online safety and security. We analysed four social media-related Archers’ storylines from the last 24 months. Our analysis shows that The Archers storylines enable us to look at human–computer interaction in relief so that instead of only looking at how people use technology we can also see the context in which it is used and the usually unseen support structures. The Archers narratives also provide a rich picture of how the fixed space of the physical world interacts with virtual space. In the broader context, the social media storylines provide us with an understanding of how connecting, care receiving and care giving take place in both fixed space and virtual space, and how these co-connected relationships of care receiving and care giving contribute to a form of security more expansive than technologically enabled data protection.