About This Project

Billions of hours are spent every week playing online video and computer games. This study aims to estimate the prevalence of addiction to these games in the general population, calculate its stability over time, and quantify what influence, if any, it has on mental and physical health.

The data and insights generated by this study will inform the public, scientists, and health practitioners. It will provide useful evidence to help determine if gaming addiction is an real psychiatric disorder.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

In 2013 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) identified Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) as a potential psychiatric disorder that might merit inclusion in a future revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; APA, 2013). In line with this, the third section of the DSM-5 now details necessary and sufficient conditions for future diagnoses of IGD. Unfortunately, most research in this area know is derived from samples of convenience such as online support communities and Internet-based gaming forums. Shortcomings like these risk seriously misestimating the prevalence of IGD and can say little about its persistence and impact on health over time.

What is the significance of this project?

Because the quality of existing studies vary, estimates of so-called "gaming addiction" range from 0.1% (Festl et al., 2013) or as high as 50% (Hur, 2006). The proposed study is meant to address this gap in our understanding by conducting a prospective study of IGD in a nationally representative cohort. In particular, the study will evaluate the prevalence of acute IGD in the general population and investigate the extent to which these indicators and IGD are stable and influence health.

What are the goals of the project?

The project will recruit and follow a large nationally representative sample of American adults (≥ 5,000) to accomplish three goals.

The first goal is to quantify the prevalence IGD in the general population. To this end, participants will compete a symptoms checklist derived from the proposed DSM5 guidelines. The second goal is to quantify how stable IGD diagnoses are over time. Participants will complete measures at two points in time, once at the start of the study and again 6 months later. Finally, the third goal is to determine if IGD has effects on health. Measures derived from WHO and CDC research will be examined using a Bayesian hypothesis-testing framework.