Parents need to be careful about what kind of video games their children like to play as this choice may have a direct impact on their behavior and attitudes in real life situations. A recent correlational study found that if children spend more than 30 minutes a day playing violent video games, they will be more likely to adopt aggressive behavior.
Video games are all children’s’ all-time favorite and they can spend hours on their favorite game without worrying about their hunger or sleep. Like other parts of the world, Pakistani children also love to play video games as their leisure time activity. However, the important question here is What kind of video game does your child love to play? Because the kind of games children are playing directly affect the way they behave in real life situations.
In the times of PUBG hype in Pakistan, this study made an important contribution by providing statistical evidence to support the positive association between time spent on violent video games and chances of learning aggressive behavior.
In the year 2020, First-Person Shooter PUBG has been the most popular game in Pakistan. However, this violent game is known as a killer game now since it took the lives of 3 young children within a two weeksโ span. After these incidents, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) suspended the game in the country.
In order to test the proposed association between violent video games and aggressive behavior in children, the author selected a sample of total 100 school students (50 male, 50 female) in Lahore through purposive sampling and collected data for statistical analysis through a self-reported questionnaire. The study sample included students from six different government and private schools in Lahore.
The participants were given a diary to record the time spent on different video games for a week. Upon successful completion of the diary, students were requested to fill in a self-reported questionnaire on aggressive behavior.
This study is an important contribution in existing research since it practically implemented the theme and recorded respective results by offering four type of violent video games to study participants:
I. Action and Fighting
II. First-Person Shooter
III. Adventure and
IV. Role Play
Since the author did not find statistical evidence for normality of variables studied in the research, the Spearman-Brown correlation was used to investigate the association between aggressive behavior and violent video games. The study used Mann-Whitney U test to examine gender differences while backward regression analysis was conducted to check whether the four selected kinds of video games would predict learning of aggressive behavior in study participants.
The study found that boys show strong preference for adventure, action and fighting, role-play and first-person shooter games and spend more time on playing violent video games as compared to girls. Moreover, the results of regression analysis also showed that video games including role-play, fighting and first-person shooter, promote aggressive behavior in children while the games with adventure and action do not predict and promote aggressive behavior.
However, since the study was conducted on a small scale (within a single city, Lahore) and included only 100 participants, its results cannot be generalized to all children in Pakistan. Regardless of the generalizability of these results, general observations and news reports do support the proposed positive association between playing violent video games and learning aggressive behavior. Arenโt They?
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References:
https://research-methodology.net/sampling-in-primary-data-collection/purposive-sampling/
