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    Disordered gaming, loneliness, and family harmony in gamers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

    Rozgonjuk, D. and Pontes, Halley and Schivinski, Bruno and Montag, C. (2022) Disordered gaming, loneliness, and family harmony in gamers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Addictive Behaviors Reports 15 (100426), ISSN 2352-8532.

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    Abstract

    The aim of this study was to investigate if and how disordered gaming, loneliness, and family relations have changed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (from 2019 to 2021), and if there were any changes in the association between these variables across three samples of gamers (for each respective year). Samples from 2019, 2020, and 2021 were matched by using propensity score matching across socio-demographic characteristics. The total effective sample comprised 897 gamers (N = 299 per year). These samples were compared in disordered gaming – separately as Gaming Disorder (GD; WHO framework) and Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD; APA framework), loneliness, and family harmony scores with analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs), with age and gender as covariates. Steiger tests were used for correlation differences testing. ANCOVAs showed that while IGD and GD scores have increased significantly during the pandemic years, loneliness and family harmony did not change significantly. However, the correlation differences tests in correlations between IGD/GD and loneliness and family harmony showed that the correlations between both IGD and GD with loneliness as well as poorer family harmony have increased during the pandemic years. This study provides empirical evidence that the well-being of gamers might have been negatively affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. While loneliness and family harmony did not increase, the stronger correlations between gaming and other variables might suggest that gaming may have been used to cope with loneliness and poorer family harmony.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Halley Pontes
    Date Deposited: 04 Jul 2022 10:55
    Last Modified: 07 Aug 2023 16:19
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/48105

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