GTA Played By More Than 70 Percent Of Teens

cdneng2 writes "This Yahoo!/Reuters article indicates that more than 70 percent of American kids have played Grand Theft Auto. The study also indicates that those who played are more likely to be in fights. It's a good thing the authors cautioned that this study did not prove a link between game violence and real-life behavior." The Gallup poll editors specifically and sensibly advised: "The data can't demonstrate causality - boys who are more prone to fighting may simply be more attracted to violent video games."

Comments

Re:Twisting Statistics

[tessaiga]

You make an excellent point, although it took me a couple of reads to figure out what your analogy was trying to say. (Mostly because the numbers in your post appear to come out of nowhere, and I didn't figure out where you were getting them until I went through the exercise myself.) Perhaps a clearer way of putting it would be:

The survey found that 34 percent of boys who admitted to being in a physical fight over the last year have played "GTA," while 17 percent who were in a fight have not played the game.

34% of boys in fights played GTA, 17% did not. This makes a total of 51%. (By the way, where did the other 49% go?)

That means that of their subset (boys who got into fights), 34/51 = 67% played GTA.

The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing found in an online survey of 517 teenagers aged 13 to 17 conducted in August that 71 percent of boys in that age group have played "GTA," along with 34 percent of girls.

Of the total group (i.e. all boys surveyed), 71% had played GTA.

Comparing the two statistics (67% vs 71%), and given that their margin of error was 5%, we can conclude that the group of violent boys did not show a statistically different tendency towards playing GTA.

I wonder if the news story didn't misquote some of the statistics in the Gallup poll, because as written this doesn't make a lot of sense. (Not to mention the fact that boys in fights who played GTA + those that didn't should = 100%, but it doesn't.) My guess is that the newshound that churned out this story was probably an arts major who didn't pay close enough attention to the details of the poll and made a small typo or two somewhere in reporting the results.