IE Behavior Intent: A Study on ICT Ethics of College Students in Korea

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate factors affecting ICT ethics (IE) behavior intent and present their implications for IE education. To achieve this, this study was conducted by sampling 449 college students through a three-stage stratified sampling. The students were surveyed to understand their ethical norms, ICT literacy and IE cognition, then the impact these variables have on IE behavior intent was analyzed. As a result of the analysis, it was found that there were differences in IE cognition and IE behavior intent depending on the gender and college year of the students, and the variable exerting the biggest impact on IE behavior intent was found to be IE cognition. Based on the analysis, this study presented three implications for IE education. These are, first, considerations for the moral development of students, second, reinforcement of IE education on property and respect for privacy, whose related problems are difficult to understand and realize with moral judgment alone, and third, the need to develop educational contents based on the analysis of the characteristics of IE. The implications of this study are meaningful in that they consider not only the necessity of IE education based on the developmental aspects of learners, which is emphasized in general ethics, but also the unique characteristics of individual elements of IE, such as property, privacy, and non-violence.