Another Study Attacks Violent Video Games, Claims To Be "Conclusive" 587
Killer Orca is one of many to tell us about a new study on the effects of violent video games on kids. The latest meta-study that analyzed research from 130 different reports claims to have "conclusively proven" that violent video games make more aggressive, less caring kids. "The team used meta-analytic procedures — the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of the individuals, ranging from elementary school-aged children to college undergraduates. [...] Anderson says the new study may be his last meta-analysis on violent video games because of its definitive findings."
Uh... no. (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing other than a double-blind study with random selection of test subjects can truly be considered "conclusive", IMHO. All studies that I've seen thus far are hopelessly thwarted by selection bias.
Re:"not huge effects" (Score:3, Informative)
You should be able to find his methods in the preprint [iastate.edu] of this paper on his university website. I haven't had a chance to read it so I have nothing more to add.
Re:As always... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:As always... (Score:3, Informative)
Need citation. For instance, we happen to know that doing activities like boxing relieves stress and results in a calmer state.
Also, having dark fantasies an engaging them in productive ways like writing or art have also been to known to help people become more well adjusted. Carl Jung called this dark nature "the shadow" and that it must be appeased. To avoid acknowledging it is incredibly dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)
Already debunked (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We should keep an open mind about this. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.tamiu.edu/~cferguson/Much%20Ado.pdf [tamiu.edu]
Re:Just like porn "conclusively" creates rapists (Score:3, Informative)
You can see the study author's bent in this quote:
"It's now time to move on to a more constructive question like, 'How do we make it easier for parents -- within the limits of culture, society and law -- to provide a healthier childhood for their kids?'" But Anderson knows it will take time for the creation and implementation of effective new policies.
I think we have the ESRB for that. You could make the same claim about films, how are parents supposed to know what is okay for little jack and jill. Check the back of the box, it's damn simple.
Re:Funny (Score:5, Informative)
Youth crime and violence have been steadily decreasing since the introduction of the playstation in 1995. And apparently, they haven't been this low since the sixties.
"As violent videogames have become more popular in the United States and elsewhere, violent crime rates among youths and adults in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, and most other industrialized nations have plummeted to lows not seen since the 1960s." - Texas A&M International University researchers Christopher Ferguson and John Kilburn
There are some graphs out there from the US Department of Justice that show exactly this trend.
Re:As always... (Score:3, Informative)
You know, psychology has shown that "letting it out" doesn't in fact result in your become calmer. It does rather the opposite.
[citation please]
Funny, karate was a great way for me to blow off steam when I was younger. Plus, it taught me how to deal out lethal levels of real-world violence. Amazing I didn't turn out to be a karate-chopping, nunchaku-wielding psycho, huh?
Re:Conclusively proven flawed (Score:3, Informative)
A good meta-analytic study will begin by spelling out a reasonable procedure for identifying studies. For instance, in this case, a reasonable procedure would be to identify two or three electronic databases of abstracts of peer-reviewed research in psychology and sociology, then to identify some relevant key words like "violence" and "video game", and then to come up with some further objective criteria for which studies one considers and which one doesn't. For instance, one might set a time window for the studies one considers (e.g., last 15 years) or a minimum sample size. One might also have some convenience criteria, such as only searching for things published in English. Then after one has set up these sorts of criteria, one follows them as best one can to identify the studies to include, and then one includes all the ones that match the criteria.
Moreover, good meta-analytic methodology will involve examining the strengths and weaknesses of the studies involved, figuring out the sample sizes, and using good statistical methods to get an overall result that is better than the best of the non-meta studies, because it has the benefit of a much larger effective sample size.
Can subjectivity sneak in? Of course it can. Peer-review can help here. But of course science delivers probability and not certainty--and that's fine.
A Meta-Analysis of bad studies creates a bad Meta (Score:5, Informative)
My wife's PhD thesis was a Meta-Analysis, and I helped her create some new tools for doing the math behind the analysis so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the topic. The process (greatly simplified) is this. Dig through hundreds of articles published in peer reviewed journals on the topic you are examining, and find as many as you can that test the specific theory you are studying. All the articles included in the meta-analysis must test the same theory. Next you need to reverse engineer the numbers reported in the article. This can be a bit tricky since each article may have reported their result using different statistical tests. Occasionally some articles don't have all the relevant numbers and you have to contact the author. Once you have all that data together the math is relatively straight forward.
Presuming that all the other articles that you feed into the process are based on high quality research, then a Meta-Analysis can give you an insight to the overall strength of the results of the theory being tested. As you might imagine this process can easily be a Garbage In Garbage Out sort of situation. The researcher performing the meta-analysis must have the ability to identify bad studies that overlooked key moderating variables, or were simply done poorly and remove these bad studies from their analysis. If you want to attack this meta-analysis, attack the articles it was based off of. A meta-analysis by itself is not 'conclusive' just because of the method it represents. The analysis itself must be performed on many many well done studies in order to have any credibility of its own.
Re:So does living in New York (Score:3, Informative)
I know it's a joke, but in fairness, it's not that New Yorkers are uncaring.
It's more like... you have to learn to ignore *everyone*. It's not that we learn to ignore the few homeless people we encounter; it's that we learn to ignore our millions of neighbors. The homeless are just lumped into the group of "the millions of people in this city that I don't have time to think about right now."
New Yorkers are actually pretty nice and helpful and look out for each other. The funniest thing is, I said something like that to someone and they said, "No way. I went to New York and was hanging around in Times Square, and everyone there was horribly rude and nasty."
I laughed pretty hard at that. New Yorkers don't spend time in Times Square. Those horrible, nasty, rude people you run into at all the New York tourist traps? Those are other tourists.
Re:As always... (Score:3, Informative)
And,of course, was quite probably doing steroids for the vast majority of that time. Along with who knows what other strength enhancers. Unless you can prove that all the boxers who don't take drugs exhibit the same behaviors your argument isn't worth the electrons it's composed of.
Re:As always... (Score:2, Informative)
Damnit ISU, keep it together! (Score:3, Informative)
"We can now say with utmost confidence that regardless of research method -- that is experimental, correlational, or longitudinal -- and regardless of the cultures tested in this study [East and West], you get the same effects," said Anderson, who is also director of Iowa State's Center for the Study of Violence. "And the effects are that exposure to violent video games increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in both short-term and long-term contexts. Such exposure also increases aggressive thinking and aggressive affect, and decreases prosocial behavior."
As an ISU alum, I'm kind of ashamed. Not as bad as when a prof was judged incompetent in a RIAA trial, but it's still kinda sad. From what I gather, he's not doing any tests himself, he's just looking for the trend in papers on the subject. So what he's actually discovered is most papers on the subject are written by psychologists with their head up their ass.
Psychology is a retardedly soft science.