Psychology Research Study - Video Games and Violence

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A Careful Analysis of a Research Study: Dr. Andersen’s Hypothesis

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of a recent study examining the effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior in young children. Let me first provide a brief summary of the study. (a) The hypothesis is that violent video games cause aggression in young children. (b) The target population is young children. (c) The samples are young school age children and the sample sizes are sixty children separated into two groups with 30 children being in the experimental group and 30 children being in the control group. (d) The independent variable is violent video games and the dependent variable is aggression. (e) The result of the experiment were …show more content…

The research was not an entirely valid test of Dr. Andersen’s hypothesis because participants were not on an even playing level as far as consistency in exposure to violent video games. Dr. Anderson selected the non-violent and educational video for the control group but he did not select the violent video game for the experimental group, so his findings based on the effects of violent video games are not consistent. The different types of video games played by each individual child needed to be taken into account. The amount of experience and familiarity each participant had with playing violent video games as well as their gender should also have been taken into consideration. The results that Dr. Andersen obtained at the close of the experiment showed that the children who were exposed to violent video games for the experiment scored higher at aggression tests, however, these results may have been achieved due to the fact that some of the children in the experimental group have had prolonged exposure to violent video games outside of the experiment parameters. (b) A more valid test of the hypothesis could be constructed by choosing children who have somewhat the same amount of familiarity and experience in playing violent video games and choosing the type of violent video games that they were allowed to play during the experiment.

Dr. Andersen recently

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