New Research Suggests Violent Games Increase Your Number of Sexual Partners

This is also the same piece of research that apparently implies that videogames have no positive effect.

According to the widely sourced article in the Deseret News:

Alex Jensen had the perfect gig for a college senior. One of his favorite professors at Brigham Young University was going to let him research one of his favorite pastimes: video games.

What could possibly go wrong? Whatever he found likely would turn into a scholarly journal article that would boost his chances of getting into the right graduate school and becoming a professor himself one day.

Everything was great until the 24-year-old from West Jordan started to compile the results. They were bad, so bad Jensen still hasn’t told his friends what he found. He only told his wife this week, because his findings were scheduled to be published today in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence and reporters were starting to call.

Turns out that after reviewing responses from 813 college students around the nation, Jensen learned that the more the students play video games, the worse their relationships are with friends and parents.

Can this really be true? BYU professor Laura Walker, the article’s lead author said that: “Everything we found associated with video games came out negative.”

Curious to know more, I found a copy of the report and read it.

Essentially, the report questioned hundreds of students on a large number of topics. Internet use, porn, video games, sexual partners, drugs and relationships were all topics that students were asked about. The report then used the power of maths to find correlations between them.

The report only once makes mention of the fact that a correlation does in no way suggest either cause, effect or even a solid relationship between the actions in question. From looking over their results they appear to have found types of personalities, not cause and effect.

Here are a few interesting correlations the report found:

• “The research that has been conducted suggests a [...] positive relationship between violent video game use and aggression”
• “[P]arameter estimates suggesting that using the internet for pornography was positively related to drinking behaviors.”
• “[P]arameter estimates suggesting that using the internet for pornography was positively related to the number of sexual partners.”
• “Recent work suggests that pornography use is so pervasive among male college students that it may be considered ‘normative’”

And perhaps the best correlation they found:

• “violent video game use was associated with more sexual partners”

Yes. This solid piece of research found correlation between playing violent games and more sexual partners. The above correlations show clearly that drawing cause and effect conclusions from these correlations is fascicle. Sadly, none of the porn-related correlations were reported in the news article.

In addition or porn, the research also dealt with relationships. Correlation exists between playing videogames and poor relationships, and from this they heavily implied that playing videogames damages any kind of relationship. They also made passing remarks about how violent games may cause marital violence.

Furthermore, the findings regarding video games and aggression (see Anderson and Dill 2000) may have implications for the way in which men treat women as they enter romantic relationships during this period of time.

The research is interesting and I’m sure is accurate, but the conclusions being drawn from it are far from reliable. To its credit, the report does admit to the fact that further research is needed in order to get truly useful and accurate conclusions.

While our discussion of the findings often took a causal tone, it was done simply to present possible interpretations and to underscore the need for future work to examine these possibilities.

If anything, this report will sadly most likely be misused and misinterpreted as fuel for the anti-videogame lobbyists. When in fact it should be viewed as an interesting study into the young adult, and basis for further research.

Via: GamePolitics and Destructoid