New Evidence on Youth and Violent Video Games

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girl’s facility included all of the girl’s because the facility was much smaller, thus the sample consisted of 55% boys and 45% girls. Both the boys and the girls in the sample are extensively involved in diverse forms of antisocial conduct and have extensive juvenile justice histories. In the sample the model youth committed more than 15 acts of delinquencies and nearly 9 acts of serious violence. Approximately70% were drug sellers and 64% sold drugs on a daily basis. This sample provided an ideal opportunity to examine the link between violent video game exposure and delinquency in a clinical sample.

The measure was total delinquency and serious violence, these were assessed using the Self-Report of Delinquency which assess violent and non-violent offending in the 12 month prior to residential placement. The delinquent acts included drugs, stolen cars and property, carrying a weapon, attacking someone, gang fighting, hitting a parent, and attacking others. The video games used were violent and the measures included a multiplicative measure of the frequency of playing multiplied by the content of the youth’s top three favorite games. The participants were asked how often they played the games, whether they enjoyed the violent games opposed to games where the characters were nice and helped people, the number of years they played the violent games, ant their total screen time. The sociodemographic were used to prevent the onset of correlates of delinquency and violence. Sex and age were used in the various models, young age, minority status, male gender, and early and early onset have been shown to predict delinquency and violence in juvenile justice samples. Psychopathy was assessed using the Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory which measures the affective, behavioral, and interpersonal components of the psychopathy construct. This personality disorder is characterized by deficits in these areas and correlate to violence and youth violence. The results showed three significant effects, frequency of violent video game play, an attitudinal measure of how much the youth liked to play video games with violence in them, were significantly associated with total delinquency.

The results show that media violence in affecting psychological variables such as feelings, thoughts and aggressive behaviors is established. The relationship to the psychopathology of serious juvenile offenders is only beginning to be understood. This data shows that playing violent video games and having a preference for them is related to delinquency and violence even when considering delinquency and psychopathy which has a definite link to crime. This data is limited because of its cross-sectional nature. A longitude design where delinquents are followed over time to examine ways that the violent video game playing impacts their behavior was not possible and is needed going forward. At a very minimum these results in combination with other findings on video games and aggression suggest that violent video games may be one risk factor for delinquency. This study can bridge the gap in the research between criminal justice and the psychological study of violent video games and aggression. On one side the use of these clinical samples of juvenile delinquents allows the research to control for the relative effects of media variables and delinquency history, personality and other risk factors, this is a benefit to psychology. The benefit to criminal justice is in the fact that violent video game playing and attitudes towards violent video games provides two risk factors that are associated with violence and delinquency. It is estimated that the average juvenile consumes about three hours of electric media per day while it is about 6 hours a day for those in a psychiatric facility. Substantial time is spent on playing violent video games which are shown to be associated with serious delinquency and serious violence.

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