New Book Cuts Through Violent Video Game Myths

Terry Bosky suggests a recent interview from Game Couch with one of the authors of an upcoming book which fights the "myths and hysteria" surrounding violent video games. Dr. Cheryl K. Olson explains how many of the studies linking aggression with video games were flawed or misguided, and she discusses some of her own findings. Quoting: "Until now, the most-publicized studies came from a small group of experimental psychologists, studying college students playing nonviolent or violent games for 15 minutes. It's debatable whether those studies are relevant to real children, playing self-selected games for their own reasons (not for cash or extra credit!), in social settings, over many years. But media reports and political rhetoric often ignore that distinction. Also, the most-published researchers have built their careers around media violence. Their studies were designed under the assumption that violent video games are harmful, which dictated the questions they asked and how they framed their results. Media violence is just a small part of what we do, so we could look at the issue with fresh eyes and no agenda."

Comments

Re:An accurate sampling?

[Bigjeff5]

You really aren't versed in survey sampling standards, most surveys only involve a couple hundred people, if that. The way surveys work is you use a small number of people but you statistically balance the people involved based on catagories (they call these demographics). For example, if 40% of kids who play video games are between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families, then 40 out of 100 kids in the study need to be between the ages of 6 and 10, white, and come from middle class families. Depending on how accurate you wanted to go, if you have accurate demographics to start with you could get decent results using 100 kids in a single town, but that would be very very hard to do, and hard to verify your results. It's not 1200 that should worry you for accuracy, that's actually a pretty large number; it's the two states part. It seems to me they may not be taking region of the country into account for this, which might be a factor or might not.