Dataset for: Where Digital Safety Breaks Down: A Psychometric Network Analysis of Social Media Engagement, Security Disengagement and Risky Cybersecurity Practices

This dataset contains anonymised survey data from 372 undergraduate students at a public university in Ghana, collected during the 2024/2025 academic year for the study “Where Digital Safety Breaks Down: A Psychometric Network Analysis of Social Media Engagement, Security Disengagement and Risky Cybersecurity Practices.” The dataset includes 23 retained questionnaire items comprising 11 measures of social media engagement, four measures of security disengagement, and eight measures of risky cybersecurity practices, with higher scores indicating stronger endorsement or more frequent performance of each behaviour. The data were analysed using polychoric correlations, exploratory graph analysis, EBICglasso network estimation, bridge expected influence, node predictability, bootstrap stability procedures, and an exploratory network comparison test. The dataset is intended to support research on human-centred cybersecurity, cyberpsychology, social media behaviour, digital risk, and psychometric network analysis, and all personally identifiable information has been removed to protect participant confidentiality.