# The Effect of Countermeasure Readability on Security Intentions
## 4 Methodology
### Participants  
Participants were found using convenience and snowball sampling. Some participants were personally asked to participate, others through WhatsApp groups. A second platform used to draw participants was the Microsoft Teams channel of the bachelor's course Information Security, taught at Utrecht University. As a reward, we included a EUR 15.00 gift card draft (i.e., a EUR 15.00 gift card was randomly allotted to one participant).  
Taking PMT into the questionnaire meant the number of questions became quite high. [PERSON] [60] advises against a questionnaire that is too long because respondents are less likely to answer (compared to a short one) and often pay less attention. For that reason, further questions that were not essential (e.g., demographic) to this research, but would increase the questionnaire's length, were excluded.  
This gained 131 respondents after running the survey for 14 days. This number was reduced to 88 (\(N=88\)) after checking the responses' validity using three measures.  
First, the'red herring' question had to be answered correctly (see Appendix A). This question asked participants to fill the gap (multiple choice) in the previously given definition of a man-in-the-middle attack, which was essential to understand since statements about it had to be responded to later.  
Second, all questions needed to be answered. Third, the survey had to be completed in a credible time span (>5 min). With an average duration of 15.80 min and a standard deviation of 10.25 min (\(Median=13.04\)) when removing outliers, this duration threshold was seen as reasonable. Outliers were defined by data points with greater duration than one hour, as these subjects had most likely paused between questions (some even resumed after days, causing enormous outliers). If a record failed to meet one of these criteria, it was not taken into the results.  
The total sample was composed of mostly non-native English speakers (97%). Three people reported English as their first language, 82 noted it was their second language, two called it their third language, and one respondent described English as a fourth language.  
Of the 88 subjects, 77 were Dutch speakers (first language). The other 11 subjects reported having the following languages as their first tongue: 1 Arabic, 4 Indonesian, 1 Russian, 1 Swahili, and 1 Tamil. Of these 85 non-natives, 59 reported their English reading level was roughly on par with or above their reading level in their native tongue.  
This implies that at least 26 out of 88 participants have an English reading level below their first language reading level. Expectedly these reported, on average, a score significantly lower (\(M=5.50\), \(SD=0.91\)) on reading skill than the other 62 (\(M=6.21\), \(SD=1.03\)), \(t(52.91)=-3.22\), \(p=0.002\).  
Reading skill was measured by a 7-point Likert scale (ranging from'strongly disagree' to'strongly agree') response to the statement \"I can understand academic English texts\". Of the subjects, 61 (69%) were between 18 and 24 years old (most likely being students due to convenience and snowball sampling), 11 were between ages 25 and 34, seven were between 55 and 64, five were 65 or older, two between 45 and 54, and the remaining two respondents fell into the age groups under 18 and 35-44 years old, respectively.