Yet another study that looks into the relationship between violent games and aggressive behavior in children has caught the attention of the press, appearing everywhere from CNN to the Washington Post. Once again, the study is being offered as conclusive evidence that violent games are bad for kids; the Post quotes its lead author as stating, "we now have conclusive evidence that playing violent video games has harmful effects on children and adolescents." But the study itself is far less decisive than that statement would imply, and some aspects of its methods have already been criticized by others in the psychology community.
It appears to be generally accepted within the research community that real-world violence and, to a lesser extent, violent media, can promote aggressive behavior in children. Violent games have attracted attention because their immersive environments and personal involvement appear to place them somewhere between real violence and passive media consumption. To date, however, there hasn't been clear evidence that games are any worse than other forms of media consumption. More generally, connections between aggression as assayed in studies and real-world violence have also been tenuous.
Analyzing the literature is made more challenging by the fact that the studies that address the topic rarely use standardized study populations or measurements of aggression or violent content. Trying to identify reasonably equivalent papers in order to perform a meta-analysis leaves most of the field's literature on the cutting-room floor. Unfortunately, the new paper, available as an open access publication in the journal Pediatrics, doesn't appear to improve the situation.
The authors perform a single analysis that incorporates three longitudinal studies of aggression and gaming, two performed in Japan, and one in the US. Students were surveyed on the types of video games they played, and then a follow-up survey determined their levels of aggressive behavior several months later. Unfortunately, almost everything else involved in the studies was different. The three surveys targeted different age groups with essentially no overlap, used different measures of violent game content, different measures of physical aggression, and performed the follow-up surveys at different time periods.
The results suggest that, even in the two very different cultures, there was a significant correlation between the use of violent games and physical aggression. The authors correctly note that the persistence of this correlation across ages and cultures suggests it is significant.
Unfortunately, the authors attempt to treat the data as a single, unified body when they perform a pathway analysis in an attempt to demonstrate a degree of causality; given the differences described above, their decision to do so doesn't appear to be well justified. Regardless, when evaluated for its predictive power, playing violent games came in a distant third behind two well-known predictors of aggressive behavior: gender (boys are more aggressive) and current instances of aggressive behavior. Controlling for those two did reveal that violent games had a statistically significant predictive value.
To be clear: I wouldn't be shocked if these results were replicated in a better-designed study. I just don't think that the authors' conclusion, that "frequent playing of violent video games is an important causal risk factor for youth aggression," is actually well-supported by this work. I'd be equally skeptical if other psychological studies lumped nine-year-olds with people in their late teens and used different measures of behavior.
Originally Posted by Veho Nex
Re: The Gaming News Thread
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