Video games linked to poor relationships with friends, family
January 23, 2009A new study connects young adults' use of video games to poorer relationships with friends and family - and the student co-author expresses disappointment at his own findings.
Brigham Young University undergrad Alex Jensen and his faculty mentor, Laura Walker, publish their results Jan. 23 in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
The research is based on information collected from 813 college students around the country. As the amount of time playing video games went up, the quality of relationships with peers and parents went down.
"It may be that young adults remove themselves from important social settings to play video games, or that people who already struggle with relationships are trying to find other ways to spend their time," Walker said. "My guess is that it's some of both and becomes circular."
For the record, Walker did not stand in the way of her family's wish for a Nintendo Wii. Jensen had hoped to find some positive results as justification for playing Madden NFL.
Study participants reported how often they play video games. They also answered a battery of questions measuring relationship quality, including how much time, trust, support and affection they share with friends and parents.
But the researchers say video games do not themselves mean "game over" for a relationship because the connection they found is modest.
"Relationship quality is one of a cluster of things that we found to be modestly associated with video games," Walker said. "The most striking part is that everything we found clustered around video game use is negative."
Statistical analyses also revealed that the more young adults play video games, the more frequent their involvement in risky behaviors like drinking and drug abuse. Young adults who played video games daily reported smoking pot almost twice as often as occasional players, and three times as often as those who never play.
For young women, self-worth was low if their video game time was high.
And despite heavy involvement with the research, Jensen does not admit the results to his own family. For now he holds out hope that future research will exonerate consoles or games designed for multiple players.
He's also curious how video games may affect young couples. Nearly three-fourths of college-aged men in the study played video games regularly. By comparison, just 17 percent of their female counterparts played more than once a month.
"The gender imbalance begs the question of whether chasing a new high score beats spending quality time with a girlfriend or wife," Jensen said.
Source: Brigham Young University
Sep 07, 2009
Online games are a pretty social affair, as a majority of mmo gamers make friends in the game's community.
Many have even found girlfriends on such games.
However, I can see how a person with an escapist personality could loose touch with their wives and family.
In those situations it's likely that there's other elements involved in detachment.
Some people will become addicted. But isn't it better than alternative addictions. Obviously it is not perfect, but there is clearly more depth to the kids playing video games is bad issue.
When my son was in high school a few years ago, he characterised his school population as broken roughly into thirds, viz, jocks, heads (druggies) and nerds (typically gamers). He didn't know of anyone who straddled those divides.
His former high school has just put in an astroturfed sports complex for the jocks that costs about as much as the rest of the high school and there has been a continuing expensive drug abatement program that doesn't seem to reduce druggie numbers in the slightest.
The nerds don't cause any trouble and, as you might expect given how American public schools work, don't get any money spent on them even though the nerd subculture encompasses virtually all of the really bright, capable kids.
My son was one of the nerds. He speaks fluent Japanese (took college classes in high school) and will be graduating from UC Santa Barbara in April. He's already working as an editor for a major technical media firm.
This is the sort of nonsense you'd expect to come out of a university that has a "School of Family Life"
http://news.byu.e...mes.aspx
It's little wonder that educational costs are spiraling out of control when universities provide sheltered employment for these sort of people.
Video games, in my limited experience, don't have a value that's readily appreciated by non-users. What outsiders see is people who suddenly find meaning where they themselves do not, or do not want to.
On the other hand, there's a certain element of truth to the observation that gaming doesn't provide a balanced mix of what's available in reality. Try finding a church in Second Life. I found a person in one, one time. Science? Go to the beautiful site with models of all major spacecraft, and a theater with live footage. No one there. Go to one of the few museums. No one there. But. Go to a popular sex store? A dozen people at any time. Sex clubs? Sometimes dozens of people. It's hard to claim Second Life promotes family unity.