Interactive video games are more likely to harm social skills of young girls than thei male peers who play frequently, a study claims.
The popularity of interactive video games has sparked concern among parents, educators, and policymakers about how the games affect children and adolescents. Most research on the effect of gaming on youth has focused on problematic gaming and negative effects like aggression, anxiety, and depression.
Researchers from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and University of California, Davis in the US looked at how playing video games affects the social skills of 6- to 12-year-olds.
It found that playing the games affected youth differently by age and gender, but that generally speaking, gaming was not associated with social development.
However, the researchers found that 10-year-old girls who played games frequently had less social competence than 12-year-olds than girls who played less frequently. “Our study may mitigate some concerns about the adverse effects of gaming on children’s development,” said Beate Wold Hygen, postdoctoral fellow at the NTNU, who led the study published in the journal Child Development.
“It might not be gaming itself that warrants our attention, but the reasons some children and adolescents spend a lot of their spare time playing the games,” said Hygen.
The researchers studied 873 Norwegian youth from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds every two years for six years when the children were ages 6 to 12.
The children and their parents reported how much time the youth spent playing video games — using tablets, PCs, game consoles, and phones. The youth’s teachers completed questionnaires on the children’s and adolescents’ social competence, including measures of cooperation, assertion, and self-control. The youth told researchers how often they played games with their friends. (PTI)
