Holy jesus fucking christ there is so much wrong with this study I don't know where to begin. Speaking as a psychologist myself, just reading through this article almost made me throw up!
Let this be a lesson to all that just because a study has been accepted into a journal, doesn't mean it's actually good, useful or well executed. Take, for example, their sample group. They used psychology students who received course credit for participating in the study (most psychology courses require undergrad psych students to participate in several hours of research as mandatory assessment). Unfortunately, these students have notoriously invalid responses, due to certain effects present in their life, such as the fact that they study psychology and therefore approach psychological studies in a specific way. Second is the fact that nowhere do they cite that the majority of video game players are male (trust me, I know this I did a meta-analyse on this stuff
) and then they go on to have a study comprised of 500 women to 313 men. Not a particularly representative sample group.
Unfortunately no comment can be made regarding their cultural validity because (If ProjectREADY exists at all) the study was performed to target a very specific cultural group, that of adolescents within the United States. However we can point out that this study designed to look at emerging trends in adolescents actually targeted people with a mean age of 20.00 in women and 20.04 in men. Adolescents indeed.
They also based a lot of their pre-study theorising off studies that have had a lot of doubt cast on them by other studies, and don't mention the fact that the findings in the studies they cited have been unable to be reproduced reliably (smaller effect sizes regarding increased aggression after playing video games can be produced reliably but are not statistically significant, nor do they remain for long periods of time).
There responses regarding risk-taking behaviour were measured using a Likert scale (i.e. choose a number between 1 and 10) in a most amusing fashion. Their response range was using a scale of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 where 0 was never and 5 was every day or almost every day... For questions such as "How often do you binge drink" and "How often do you take illicit drugs". Ignoring the self-evident problems in self-reporting questions, particularly about illegal activity, having such a ridiculously small Likert scale for questions of this magnitude is ridiculously foolish.
I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of the study. I can only see the discussion part of it getting worse as they go on, so I'll skip to the end and have a look at their "implications for future research". Two secs.
...
Fuck me, this is just the best statement I have ever seen:
"While unable to draw causal conclusions, the
findings highlight that the forms of leisure activities young
people engage in are related to healthy, or in many cases
unhealthy, development. Indeed, in having greater autonomy
as they make the transition to adulthood, young
people’s choices regarding their leisure activities may have
particularly significant ramifications for their well-being
both during this period of their lives, and into adulthood."
If that's tl;dr for you, it's basically saying "we can make no inferences other than that peoples choices may affect their lives in some way".
To sum up my entire post in a tl;dr version for you all:
This study is crap, it should not be considered psychological research at all.
