Container shipping security
performance can generally be assessed by hard (objective)
measures and soft (perceptual or responsive) measures
(Dalton et al., 1980; Shang and Lu, 2009). Because actual
incident data are difficult to obtain and perceptual measures
are valid indicators of security performance (Fawcett et al.,
1997; Shang and Lu, 2009; Voss et al., 2009), this study used
perceptual-based measures to assess the security performance
of container shipping firms.