We are Form 2 and 3 IEP students from The Jockey Club Eduyoung College who are doing a Deep Learning Research project on the gaming and social media use habits of our students.
Purpose:
In 2016-17, HKU interviewed 2,006 primary students from P4-P6 about their gaming or social media habits from 8 schools across Hong Kong. Since, our S1, S2, S3 students match the age-range of the initial cohort studied. Our aim is to see if our findings fit the original gaming or social media habit results. Also, we are looking for data to see whether or not our students may be at risk of developing a gaming or social media disorder as laid out by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018. Also, we compared their responses to a gaming addiction questionnaire at gamequitters.com to help ascertain how many of the students surveyed are at risk of developing a gaming disorder.
Description:
Initially, we created a bilingual survey by first reading the HKU research results and taking an online gaming survey from gamequitters.com. Next, 17 students from F2-F3 created 5 questions each which they thought would best retrieve information which would help compare the original HKU study and the gamequitters.com questionnaire. Then, we choose 8 questions from the 95-question pool and created a bilingual survey. After that, we administered the surveys and interviewed students from S1-S2-S3 during two consecutive lunch hours and entered the results of the survey into an excel file for analysis. Finally, we analyzed the survey data and watched the video interviews to see how students answered our questions to determine the differences in the data between the HKU research and our own.
Participant Break Down
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A: Excessive video game playing
Generally speaking, students played video games or used social media every day of the week and spent an average of 24 hours a week gaming or on social media. Male students spent 26 hours per week on gaming and 58.8% of them spent over 21 hours a week gaming.
HKU survey 2016-17 Time spent gaming or on social media per week
TJCEC Survey Questions
According to gamequitters.com, gaming addiction refers to uncontrollable and persistent behaviours which cause deception, isolation from family and friends, a drop in overall performance at other tasks, and various mood swings. Based on preliminary estimations the trend of the surveyed students at risk or might already be addicted for male students was 58.8% and for female students 41.5%. This certainly is disturbing.
C. Solutions
To begin with, after going over our survey results which show a rapid rise in gaming among our age cohorts, we have come up with the following solutions to reduce the chance of adolescents in our age group becoming at risk of developing a gaming or social media addiction.
Initially, to alleviate the existing problem, we think that parents can help by being better role models by changing their phone use habits and spending more time doing real things with their children, like going on hikes, playing social board games or anything which helps children and parents have stronger bonds. Along with this, we think parents can also create guidelines for their children which help their children do more meaningful activities in their spare time, like joining community service clubs or doing volunteer work.
Additionally, we think that students and parents can benefit from creating schedules which promote family fun time and limit game or social media use time. We also think that parents, teachers and students can create acceptable and reasonable mastery levels on schoolwork and create academic contracts with students in all subjects. If students do not maintain these levels, they lose complete use of their mobile phones until they regain their acceptable standing. This can be done by staying on the same workflow or through doing extra graded work to more quickly raise their academic standing back to their contractual level. By teachers babysitting phones and not parents this can take pressure off parent-child relationships. Also, some students suggested that parents and children make use of study apps, like Pomodoro to set reasonable study and break times for students. We also think that these types of apps could also be used for gaming and social media use to give gamers and social media users breaks to reduce eye damage and the possibly reduce the risk of becoming addicted.
Nevertheless, we also think that one reason gaming and social media is so much fun is because we can more easily experience success and gain rewards, and therefore, we think that parents and schools need to set reasonable success levels with build in rewards which are not necessarily known. For example, we watched a gaming addiction video, and one reason why students turn to gaming is because they can more easily create success, gain rewards – which aren’t always known, and they can chat with other gamers at the same time. All these things make gaming very attractive and schoolwork less attractive, but what if schoolwork was more like gaming. For example, rather than having specific awards for specific things, what about having random awards as well, which give students opportunities to connect with others, like a gift-certificate to a photography workshop, a cooking or martial arts class, a stand-up boarding lesson, so as to create opportunities which open up new possibilities and learning along with social interaction at the same time .
D. Conclusions
In conclusion, we can see from our survey and comparing it with the HKU survey is that a gaming trend is rising rapidly among young people, and as can be seen from the data between the two surveys, it is increasing rapidly among both males and females; nevertheless, it is rising even more rapidly in young girls.
Our TJCEC survey included 187 males and 94 females from one secondary school in Hong Kong. We compared the results with the HKU gaming survey which was done in 2016-17. Although, our surveys are not the same, we were looking for similar data which we could compare to try and learn how our gaming and social media use habits are changing. Although, our conclusions will not be completely accurate, what we can see is that gaming is rising rapidly among both males and females but has been even more drastic in young females than young males.
Our survey shows that 85% of those surveyed want to increase their gaming time, which indicates that most of our cohort is not recognizing how gaming or social media use may be impacting on other areas of their lives as only 38% of those survey acknowledged that their gaming habits were interfering with their relationships. And then, 46% feel negative emotions, like boredom or sadness when they are not gaming, which motivates them to think about their games or when they can start gaming again.
Although gaming and social media use habits are on the rise, one alarming statistic is the number of students playing violent video games.
Of 281 students surveyed, 196 are playing violent video games, and what we can see from these numbers is that 26% of the students surveyed are always playing violent games. Although this may not seem high, it correlates with the 25% of students who are at high risk of being addicted or becoming addicted to gaming. Therefore, we think this is quite concerning as we did some research on how violent video games put young people at higher risk of developing a gaming addiction than other game types. Furthermore, 24% of young people play violent games often which also puts them more at risk as well.
It is difficult to know how to ameliorate this situation. We do hope that as students mature and become more independent, they will develop other interests which can draw them away from gaming and into the real world. From now on, we think it is important that young people, teachers, and families help monitor, intervene where necessary, and put together strategies to help prevent gaming addiction in young people and develop more reasonable social media use habits which due not deter from students education and ability to build meaningful relationships in the real world.
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