Social Predictors of Videogame Addiction among Adolescent Students

Abstract

Now-a-days all of us have become mobile dependent. We are unable to comprehend the extent to which it made us dependent on it. It does great damage to the health (both physical and mental) of both children and adolescents alike. The present study was carried out to examine how adolescents are getting addicted to videogames. Further the study is also planned to examine the pattern of videogame addiction in adolescents. A sample of 100 ( 52 males and 48 female) 9th graders from four private schools were selected following purposive sampling procedure. All the students were in the age range of 13 to 16 years. All the participants were administered the Gaming Addiction Scale(GAS) and checklist composed with a list of game genres and games regularly played by this age group, were administered uniformly to all the participants. The data were analyzed using coefficient of correlation, regression and correspondence analysis. Results revealed that 18.37 percent of the participants fall in the normal, 53.06 percent in mild gaming problems and 28.57 percent fall problematic categories. Step-wise regression analysis revealed that the age of starting the game is significant predictor of video game addiction in the sample. Results also reveal that videogame addiction in the sample is affected by start-age-game, while the particular game genre is also identified.