Associations Between Children's Video Game Playing and Psychosocial Health: Information from Both Parent and Child Reports

Abstract

Video games are a highly heterogeneous form of entertainment. As recent reviews highlight, this heterogeneity makes likely that video games have both positive and negative consequences for child development. This study investigated the associations between gaming frequency and psychosocial health among children younger than 12 years of age, an understudied cohort in this field. Both parents and children reported children's gaming frequency, with parents also reporting on children's psychosocial health. Given that children may be too young to report the time they spend playing video games accurately, children's reports were scaffolded by a developmentally appropriate measure. We further investigated the potential bias of having parents report both their children's gaming frequency and their children's psychosocial health (i.e., a single source bias). Parental reports of children's gaming frequency were higher than their children's reports. However, a direct test of the potential single source bias rendered null results. Notably, however, while parental reports showed negative associations between gaming and psychosocial health, children's reports showed no associations. Specifically, based on parent reports, children's gaming was associated with more conduct and peer problems, and less prosocial behavior. As children's reports produced no associations between gaming and psychosocial health, parental reports in this study may belie an erroneous set of conclusions. We therefore caution against relying on just one reporter when assessing children's gaming frequency.

Introduction

Video games have become an inevitable facet of children's lives. This may have numerous consequences; video games have been identified as a potentially deleterious influence on children's aggressive tendencies,¹ emotional health,² and attention retention skills.^3,4 Yet, despite claims of children's susceptibility to negative gaming effects,⁵ most research has been limited to adolescent and young adult samples. Further, the limited studies with child samples are inconsistent in how they assess the frequency with which children play video games, relying on either parental or child reports but never including both to investigate potential differences in reporter effects. The current study addresses these gaps by assessing psychosocial health in children and by acquiring both parent and child reports of gaming frequency.

Video games are a quickly evolving medium. With the availability of video games on mobile and nonmobile devices, and mainstream game makers striving for more complex visuals and play mechanics, today's video games offer a highly diverse array of possible interactions.⁶ Video games today are popular among adults as well as children,⁷ are more social in nature, and show a younger age of onset than in the past.^8,9 These changes raise several issues for video game research. First, they indicate that study outcomes may quickly become outdated,¹⁰ necessitating ongoing research to understand the effects of the most modern games. Second, research that treats video games as a homogenous entity may be less likely to unveil valid and reliable effects of game playing.¹¹ While research has predominantly taken the position that video games have negative developmental consequences,^1,12 recent reviews^6,13 suggest that these same games may confer psychosocial benefits. In particular, video games may facilitate social bonding through cooperation,¹⁴ provide a training ground for emotion regulation skills,^15,16 and promote healthy motivational styles for dealing with real world failure.^6,17 However, these hypotheses are rarely researched. Finally, given gaming's increased prevalence among young children, this population seems particularly relevant for research. However, few studies have investigated the associations between video game playing and psychosocial health in children.

Only 10 studies have examined the potential effects of violent video game play on aggression^10,18 in children younger than 12 years of age. Of these studies, nine and seven of them were conducted before the years 2000 and 1990 respectively. These studies therefore investigated violent video gaming in periods when video games were far less dynamic and social than today's games. Still, in a recent correlational study, parent reports on their children's gaming habits and psychosocial health revealed a positive association between game playing and aggression and attentional difficulties.¹⁰

The present study had two goals. First, it aimed to add to the limited amount of gaming literature on children younger than 12 years of age. This is an important group for study, as several developmental differences between children and adolescents and adults make them potentially more susceptible to gaming effects.¹ Namely, children have poorer working memory¹⁹ and executive functioning,²⁰ and seem to have a poorer ability to differentiate between emotional states.²¹ Second, it aimed to investigate the potential single source bias that could account for past findings relating children's gaming frequency to negative psychosocial development. The single source bias is a form of shared-method variance where the same reporter is used to measure both the study's predictor and predicted variables.²²

It is worth distinguishing between parent and child reports of children's gaming for at least two reasons. First, compared to their children, parents likely provide higher estimates of their children's game playing²³; this could be because parents perceive video games as a dominant aspect of children's lives. Second, parents and children are susceptible to different reporting biases³; parents' estimates may hinge on their opinions of video games being better or worse for their children. These issues seem more problematic in studies where parents report on both their children's gaming habits and their psychosocial health,¹⁰ increasing the likelihood of single source bias.²⁴ In such cases, parents may have preconceived notions about gaming's influence on their children's lives, potentially manipulating their responses. These potential biases have strong implications. In particular, relying solely on parental reports may exaggerate the evidence for gaming's detrimental effects.

In studies of young children, the choice to use parent reports for both time spent gaming and children's development has been defended based on how difficult it is to get young children to report time-sensitive questions accurately.²⁵ To resolve this, we implemented a developmentally appropriate method for attaining accurate reports of gaming frequency from children—a gaming calendar. Derived from similarly used methods,^3,12 children filled in a calendar with the help of an interviewer, responding “yes” or “no” to whether they had played video games during 21 discrete periods of the past week. This method likely aids recall by giving children a concrete schema, and allows children to talk through their usage with an interviewer.

Design and Hypotheses

In the present study, both parents and children estimated children's gaming frequency. Parents reported their children's number of hours spent gaming, with children also providing estimates of hours gaming, scaffolded by them completing a gaming calendar. These measures were correlated with children's psychosocial health, namely aggressive tendencies, emotional health, hyperactivity, peer relations, and prosocial behavior. Based on recent literature highlighting the potential benefits of gaming, we expected video game playing to be positively associated with psychosocial health. In line with past research,²³ we also expected parents to report a greater amount of gaming frequency than their children. Lastly, we tested whether this expected difference reflects the influence of a single source bias, something not previously examined in this field. We therefore expected the correlations between parental reports of gaming and psychosocial health to be less positive than the correlations between children's reports of gaming and psychosocial health.

Method

Participants

Dutch children aged 7–12 years old (n=194, age range 7.27–11.43 years, M=9.22 years, SD=1.14 years) along with their primary caregiver (n=174; age range 29.95–51.47 years, M=41.88 years, SD=3.66 years) participated in this study. Twenty children also had a sibling participate. Participants were recruited from a pool of 298 participants already participating in research that tracked children's psychosocial health.²⁶ Participants were contacted via letters sent to their homes and follow-up phone invitations. The children's gender was evenly split (98 boys), and 86.6% of parent reporters were female (n=168); with the exception of three adopted mothers and one adopted father, all parents were the child's biological parent. 96.9% of parents were Dutch (n=188), with the others coming from Suriname (n=1) or nearby European countries (n=5).

Procedure

Data were collected during home visits. Children provided self-reports during a face-to-face interview with an experimenter. Parents provided their survey responses via an online questionnaire. Parents were rewarded a €20 Euro voucher check (per child) for their participation.

Measures

Psychosocial health

Psychosocial health was measured along five dimensions by parents' reports on the reliable and widely used Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ²⁷; Dutch version²⁸). The SDQ is comprised of five subscales: (a) emotional symptoms, (b) conduct problems, (c) hyperactivity/inattention, (d) peer relationship problems, and (e) prosocial behavior. All subscales consist of five items using a 3-point Likert scale (ranging from 0=“not true” to 2=“very true”), and, except for the “conduct problems” subscale, all subscales showed acceptable to good reliability: (a) emotional symptoms (e.g., “Many worries, often seems worried”; α=0.72); (b) conduct problems (e.g., “Often fights with other children or bullies them”; α=0.54); (c) hyperactivity (e.g., “Restless, overactive, cannot stay still for long”; α=0.80); (d) peer problems (e.g., “Rather solitary, tends to play alone”; α=0.68); and (e) prosocial behavior (e.g., “Shares readily with other children”; α=0.69). Sum scores were calculated for each subscale, and the sum scores of all scales except for prosocial behavior were summed to create a total difficulties score (α=0.81).

Gaming frequency

Children's frequency of video game playing was assessed by parental reports for the number of hours their child plays on average per week, and child reports for the number of hours they had played video games during the past week. In addition, children's ability to recall their gaming hours across a whole week was scaffolded by an additional measure of gaming frequency. In interviews, children looked over a calendar with the experimenter and indicated for each day over the past full week whether they had played a video game in the morning, afternoon, and/or evening. Moderate correlations were observed across all frequency measures (r≥0.47, p<0.001), supporting the validity of the calendar measure. No interviewer bias was observed; across the study's five interviewers, child reports for hours gaming—F(4, 188)=1.111, p=0.353—and the calendar—F(4, 188) <1—showed no differences.

Planned analyses

To investigate the relationship between video game play and psychosocial health, each outcome measure was correlated with the three measures of children's gaming frequency. As a preliminary step before performing these correlations, we tested for gender differences on all variables to determine whether we should control for gender. To explore a potential single reporter bias, we first compared parent and child reports of children's gaming frequency. Parent reports were separately compared to each child measure. We then performed a Fischer's r-to-z transformation²⁹ to test whether the associations between parental reports of both children's gaming frequency and their psychosocial health would differ from associations between child reports of their gaming frequency and parental reports of children's psychosocial health.

Results

Descriptives

Data from one child (and his parent) were excluded because the child did not complete the gaming calendar. Both parents' and children's reported hours of gaming were corrected for outliers, with the maximum number of reported hours being cut off at three standard deviations above the mean (parent reports: M=5.76, SD=3.87, outliers n=4; child reports: M=4.86, SD=4.25, outliers n=6). Children reported an average of 7.88 discrete play sessions per week (SD=4.15).

Gender differences

We observed several gender differences (Table 1). Regarding the SDQ, parents reported boys to be more hyperactive, less prosocial, and to have more total difficulties. Regarding gaming frequency, consistent with past studies, both parents and children indicated that boys play video games more. These gender differences led us to control for gender by running partial correlations.

Table 1.

Gender Differences

	Boys		Girls
	M	SD	M	SD	t	p
SDQ
Emotion	2.07	2.17	1.83	1.94	0.81	0.422
Conduct	1.19	1.48	0.82	1.28	1.82	0.071
Hyper	3.52	2.63	2.48	2.38	2.87	0.005^*
Peer	1.36	1.65	0.93	1.58	1.86	0.064
Prosocial	6.53	1.65	7.01	1.28	−2.28	0.024^*
Total	8.13	5.23	6.06	5.25	2.75	0.007^**
Gaming frequency
Parent hours	6.74	3.96	4.62	2.95	4.21	<0.001^**
Child hours	5.93	4.21	3.85	3.67	3.65	<0.001^**
Child calendar	9.28	3.99	6.47	3.83	4.99	<0.001^**

p≤0.05; ^**p≤0.01.

SDQ, Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.

Gaming and psychosocial health

For the relationship between gaming and psychosocial health, we observed a number of differences between parent and child reports (Table 2). Against our predictions, for parental reports, hours gaming was associated with more conduct and peer problems and with less prosocial behavior. Against our predictions, for child reports, no associations were observed between hours gaming and psychosocial health. Further, no associations were observed between the child's calendar reports and psychosocial health.

Table 2.

Partial Correlations Controlling for Gender

	Emotional problems		Conduct problems		Hyperactivity		Peer problems		Prosocial behavior		Total difficulties
	r	p	r	p	r	p	r	p	r	p	r	p
Parent hours	0.131	0.071	0.15	0.037^*	−0.008	0.907	0.166	0.022^*	−0.176	0.014^**	0.138	0.056
Child hours	0.105	0.146	0.122	0.091	0.024	0.744	0.082	0.256	−0.115	0.112	0.111	0.127
Child calendar	−0.081	0.265	0.058	0.425	0.036	0.619	0.092	0.204	−0.043	0.552	0.029	0.687

Note. “Total difficulties” is the sum score of the emotional problems, conduct problems, hyperactivity, and peer problems subscales.

p≤0.05; ^**p≤0.01.

Comparisons between parent- and child-reported gaming

When comparing reports of children's gaming frequency across parents and children, we observed that, compared to their children, parents tended to report their children playing more video games per week (parent hours=5.69, child hours=4.9; t=3.08, p=0.002). This was true for both boys and girls (parent hours=6.74, boy hours=5.93, t=2.03, p=0.045; parent hours=4.63, girl hours=3.85, t=2.39, p=0.019). To compare parent and child reports for the strength of the associations between hours gaming and psychosocial health, partial correlations were conducted with gender partialled out. Partialled correlations between frequency and each psychosocial health measure were compared across reporters using Fisher's r-to-z transformation. No significant differences were observed.

Discussion

This study investigated the associations between video game play and psychosocial health in children under the age of 12. With video games increasingly becoming a context for positive emotions and social interaction, we expected video game play to be positively associated with psychosocial health. Further, we investigated the potential influence of a single source bias, where parental reports of gaming frequency were expected to be, compared to children's reports, less positively associated with psychosocial health.

The main outcome of this study was that parent and child reports provided a different account of the association between video game playing and psychosocial health. Whereas parental reports of children's gaming frequency was associated with more conduct, peer problems, and less prosocial behavior, child frequency reports revealed no such associations. This discrepancy is especially noteworthy for two reasons. First, cross-reporter outcomes are considered more internally valid than same-reporter outcomes.²⁴ This is because cross-reporter outcomes are free from single source bias. Second, null findings were observed for both child reports of their gaming frequency, which were both provided during face-to-face interviews. Thus, had parents been the sole reporters in this study—as in past research¹⁰—this study would have concluded that gaming is negatively associated with children's psychosocial health. This conclusion seems less valid given its failure to replicate based on child reports.

This discrepancy between parent and child reports indicates a potential single source bias. However, no significant differences were observed in the magnitude of the relationship between gaming frequency and psychosocial health across reporters. This could have multiple implications. It may be that no reporter bias was present; that is, the difference in findings between parents and children were solely due to chance. We maintain that this is unlikely, given that parental reports have also been previously shown to indicate negative associations between children's gaming and their psychosocial health.¹⁰ We therefore consider it more likely that the same-reporter bias was too small an effect to be detected in a sample of this size. Furthermore, the observed associations between parental reports of gaming frequency and psychosocial health were all relatively small. These small associations may limit the extent to which the same-reporter bias can be of influence.

Limitations and future research

This study has several limitations. First, this study's cross-sectional design limits the conclusions that can be drawn. It is possible that psychosocial benefits or difficulties emerge as gaming frequency increases over time. Second, this study did not measure several potential moderators related to gaming. These variables include the type of video game played (e.g., role playing, shooting, or sport games, each with drastically different goals and play systems), violent content, the tendency to play socially, and the tendency to play cooperatively and competitively. We have argued that “video games” is an overly broad construct because of the high variability in these factors across games. There could be a number of complex interactions between these factors; for instance, that competitive play of sport games may show different associations with psychosocial health than competitive play of shooting games. To explore the range of possible interactions between game type, game content, and play style properly would require a sample size much larger than the one acquired for this study. The type of video games played may also be relevant when considering the single source bias; if parents observe their children playing more violent or stress-inducing games, this may preclude them to overestimating the potential negative impact of video games. Finally, the conduct problems subscale of the SDQ showed low reliability; this calls into question the validity of the observed negative association between gaming frequency and conduct problems.

Given these limitations, and the observed null associations between children's reported gaming frequency and psychosocial health, we encourage future studies to employ more robust methodologies, recruit larger samples, and be more comprehensive about including potential moderator and mediators. Thus, longitudinal studies among children are recommended, with future research likely benefitting from including multiple reporters of children's gaming frequency. We further recommend future studies consider the nature and content of the games frequently played by children. Particularly, recent studies support a Self Determination Theory³⁰ approach for predicting the effects of video game play.^31,32 In this approach, games that promote an individual's needs to feel autonomous, competent, and related to others are developmentally beneficial, whereas games which hinder these needs are not. Classifying games along these dimensions, or controlling for individual differences in the fulfilment of these needs during play, may therefore too be worthwhile for future research.

Conclusion

This study tentatively supports the notion that video games may not be as detrimental to children's psychosocial health as widely believed. On the other hand, no positive associations between gaming and psychosocial health were observed either. This was also the first gaming study to assess the potential influence of a single source bias, present when parents are asked to report on both their children's gaming frequency and psychosocial health. In this study, while parental reports would lead one to conclude that game playing is negatively associated with psychosocial health, child reports cast doubt on this conclusion.

Footnotes

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist.

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