impacts of videos-gaming on children and youths

 impacts of videos-gaming on children and youths

Article summary

Following the issues about the impacts of videos-gaming on children and youths, researchers are continuing to identify how it impacts on sleep. There is a gap in the number of researches made to support this issue. Therefore, in this article, the study aimed to find out how prolonged video-gaming after sleep among adolescents. The study began by choosing Seventeen male adolescents on-campus high school at Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. Their mean age was 16 years, and the researcher made sure that the participants have no sleep disorders. The researchers choose boys for the study since they are the ones spending more time on video-games than girls. Also, they were supposed to be regular players who were defined as engaging in video-games at least three times a week for a consecutive three months. This was to make sure that the children had the idea about video-gaming as this would help the researchers in identifying the change in sleep pattern behavior.  During the initial assessment, the participants showed that they had played video games for at least 3.4 years and the utmost 7.9 years.  Also, it was recorded that all the participants participate in the game for at least 6.1 hours a day. The researchers began making consent with the participants and also their parents, and later Flinders University Social and Behavioral Ethics Committee approved the project.

The procedure o the study involved placing the participants on a violent video-game for about 50-150 minutes before they went to bed. The materials used for this study are the video games materials, testing laboratory, and beds. The study was conducted on two different nights to ensure that the researchers obtained valid comparable results. Once the participants were exposed to video-gaming, they slept, and the researcher had to do a few tests. They measure the heart rate of the participants and sleep. They came up with one sing night sleep diary to measure prolonged sleep. The researcher has used an experimental study, which means that there is a likelihood to get valid results. Experimental research refers to the one based on facts rather than a correlation that is based on assumptions. Participants in the experimental study are placed in the same independent variable and prevented from other external factors that might interfere with the study.

In this study, the independent variable is the use of videos-games, while the dependent variable is the prolonged sleep. The dependent variable refers to what is being measured by the study in which the independent variable is a constant factor used across the participants to measure results. After the researchers made a comparison between regular videos-gaming and prolonged video-gaming, they found that sleep efficiency decreased by 2%, and the total sleep time reduced by at least 12 to 27 minutes across the participants. The sleep -onset latency increased by 8 to 17 minutes, and few reported cases of sleep quality were recorded.  Heart rate did not show any difference between both conditions for pre-sleep and onset sleep. The researchers concluded that prolonged video-gaming has a severe impact on their sleep no matter the time they are allowed to sleep. The researchers said that the psychological issue was not associated with the effects of using technology.

Critique

This article provides a piece of unique information that many researchers have not been in a position to show society. Firstly I find this article to be reliable and valid according to the needs of a study. When discussing study validity, it means the use of Right participants, methods, and explanation of the results is valid research is the one that provides answers to the issue being investigated. Therefore, this study is valid since it has used an experimental method hence provide valid results. The results can be used for future reference by other researchers. The reliability of the research means consistency is used by the researcher to measure the results. In this study, I find it consistent since the researcher has used the same independent variable amongst all the participants. The independent and dependent variables are very consistent throughout the study, and it is easy for the reader to tell what is being measured

Secondly, the study procedure has excellent flow from the top to the end of the study. The work is arranged according to the requirements of complete research. The researchers began by writing down the background of the study, and this is the most crucial part many people tend to omit. This part of the study helps the reader to understand other researchers who have done similar work and how it relates to the current study. The researcher goes ahead and explains the methods and the procedure part of the study and then makes a discussion on the findings.

Ethical standards are crucial factors that all the researchers need to meet when carrying out the study. Ethics in research means carrying out activities that do not harm society or are not perceived to be sensitive by the participants. Also, the recruitment process is under ethical standards and how participants are treated throughout the study. Therefore, I find this study to have met basic rules require in research. The recruitment process was done in the right manner by first informing the participants and the parents. This is to ensure that the consent is agreed to avoid violation of other people’s rights.

Finally, if I had the chance to conduct the same study, I would do it differently. For instance, the researchers found that prolonged video-gaming did not show any report on sleep quality issues. The researchers would not have concluded like this because having said that there is reduced sleep time, one can conclude the quality is not sufficient. The researchers would have taken more days to research for at least one week to know the quality of sleep. But since this is not the hypothesis of the study, other researchers will work on that.