Perceptions of Netiquette Necessity Among High School Students: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Netiquette is considered as one of the element of digital citizenship frameworks along with online safety, ethical technology and digital literacy developed by policy bodies and educational technologists. Present study is an attempt to understand how high school students perceive necessity of netiquette across five dimensions as online communication, privacy consideration, adherence to platform rules, sharing information online and cyber security practices. Simple random sampling was used to select male and female high school students, self made tool ‘Necessity of Netiquette Questionnaire’ (NNQ) was used and percentage wise scores and binary logistic regression was used as a statistical analysis. It was found that, high school students perceive necessity across the dimensions of netiquette, with the strongest identified for cyber security practices and the least for adherence to platform rules and gender does not significantly predict the perception of netiquette necessity in any dimension. This study recommends that educational policy and school curricula should continue to build on this strength, expand content on cyber hygiene, privacy practices, safe sharing, phishing awareness, and other related digital etiquettes/ netiquettes.