The National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) yesterday said it has developed the world’s first questionnaire to help people assess whether they have problematic mobile gaming (PMG) behavior.
Gaming disorder was classified as a mental health condition in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) published by the WHO in 2018, said Lin Yu-hsuan (林煜軒), a National Taiwan University Hospital psychiatrist and assistant research fellow at NHRI’s Institute of Population Health Sciences who led the research.
As the Internet has become ubiquitous and sales of mobile games have rapidly increased, mobile game addiction is gaining more attention in the field of online game addiction research, he said.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
Lin, along with psychologist Pan Yuan-chien (潘元健) and Chiu Yu-chuan (邱于峻), a physician at Mackay Memorial Hospital’s psychiatry department, developed the self-reporting questionnaire, which comes in two versions — 12 questions and four questions — using a four-point Likert scale to evaluate PMG symptoms.
Respondents are asked to answer questions about their mobile gaming behavior in the past three months, with those scoring more than 10 points in the short version likely having problematic mobile gaming habits, he said.
The questions include: I have had dry/sore eyes, sore muscles or other types of discomfort due to mobile gaming; I often cannot help picking up my phone to play mobile games for a while even if I did not plan to; In the past three months, I have felt the need to play mobile games more frequently or for longer periods; and, I feel uneasy or irritated if I cannot play mobile games.
The three factors of addiction assessed in the questionnaire are: compulsion, tolerance and withdrawal, Lin said.
“The first factor, compulsion, checks to see if the person overindulges in this type of behavior, which results in negative effects such as sore eyes and muscles, gets easily distracted from work or study and cannot help taking out their mobile phone to play every now and then,” he said.
“The second factor, tolerance, checks if the person needs to play more or more frequently, similar to a person’s tolerance for alcohol increasing” over time, Lin said.
“The third factor, withdrawal, checks if the person experiences withdrawal symptoms similar to drug withdrawal, and whether they feel anxious or irritated if they cannot play,” he said.
Using the simplified verison, the research team surveyed 10,775 fourth-grade to senior-high school students, of whom 1,495 scored higher than 10 points, indicating that 13 percent of them likely have PMG, he said.
The team also randomly selected 113 senior-high school students among the respondents for consultations with a psychiatrist and a clinical psychologist about gaming addiction problems, and the diagnoses were consistent with the results of the questionnaire, Lin said.
Their research paper, titled “Development of the Problematic Mobile Gaming Questionnaire and Prevalence of Mobile Gaming Addiction Among Adolescents in Taiwan,” was published in October last year in the academic journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
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