Abstract
This study specifies a Protective Application Use Composite restricted to self-reported protective application use. A cross-sectional survey provided 364 complete records from Computer Science undergraduates at four universities in Enugu State, Nigeria, from 393 distributed questionnaires. The score is the equal-weight average of five questionnaire categories: antivirus, firewall, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and virtual private network use. Reanalysis of the author-supplied item records yielded category means from 2.097 to 2.376 and internal-consistency coefficients from 0.958 to 0.971. The composite mean was 2.170, with a standard deviation of 0.469. The first component of the category-score correlation matrix explained 50.98 percent of variance. Item-level heterotrait–monotrait ratios ranged from 0.097 to 0.704, below the exploratory 0.85 criterion. These findings describe internal response relationships and do not establish a five-factor measurement model or external validity. Source files were combined using author-confirmed row order, and demographic fields agreed across files. Equal-width score bands remain descriptive conventions, not competence or risk thresholds. The composite requires a complete instrument-development record, ordinal factor assessment, and independent validation before diagnostic, benchmarking, or intervention-evaluation use.
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Information Security Commons, Management Information Systems Commons, Technology and Innovation Commons