Video Game Violence research focused lecture

Question 1

What did Ferguson (2015) Conduct his experiment on?

And how many participants?

Answer 1

-To investigate do angry birds make for angry children (ages 5-7)

• Correlational studies (N=64)
• Longitudinal studies (N=31)
• Experimental studies (N=19)

Question 2

What did Ferguson’s correlational studies find out about video game violence?

Answer 2

• Playing violent video games is correlated with agressive behaviour in children ( parent/teacher questionnaires) r=0.17
• Also negative correlated with prosocial behaviour (r= -0.15) and academic performance (r= -0.11)

Question 3

How are correlational studies a problem when investigating agressive behaviour and video games?

Answer 3

Similarly both are correlated with third variables such as gender, family violence and mental health.

-After controlling for these variables, the correlation goes from r=0.17 to r=0.04 (similar for helping and academic performance)