Amanda Lenhart checked in recently to talk about the latest report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. She was the lead investigator for the report, entitled “Teens, Video Games, and Civics.” Already it’s garnering considerable media and internet attention. Slashdot’s headline: “Study Finds Video Games Are Not Bad for Kids.” The results stem from a national telephone survey of 1,102 youths, ages 11-17, and their parents/guardians, that wrapped up in February of this year.
Several interesting findings came out of the research, including one that seems obvious but now has hard data backing it up: almost all children in the US play video games. Lenhart’s team broke down the data by gender, genre, game title, console, and more, ferreting out many interesting items. Here is a paragraph on gender:
The stereotype that only boys play video games is far from true in 2008, as girls constitute a large (if not equal) percentage of total gamers: 99% of boys play games, as do 94% of girls. While almost all girls as well as almost all boys play video games, boys typically play games with greater frequency and duration than girls. Boys are significantly more likely to play games daily than girls, with 39% of boys reporting daily game play and 22% of girls reporting the same. Boys are also more likely than girls to play games on any given day (60% of boys did, compared with 39% of girls), and when boys do play, they’re playing for longer periods of time.
Lenhart said I’d be interested in the findings on school gaming software, and she was absolutely correct. I suspect this might spur additional academic investigation, as a host of potential research questions come to mind from the findings on school games. This paragraph details the breakdown of students reporting school educational game use:
One-third (34%) of American teens have played a computer or console game at school as part of a school assignment. Lower-income teens (41%) and teens from homes with lower overall education levels (41%) are more likely than their counterparts (29%) to have played a game for school. Black teens (46%) are more likely that white teens (32%) to have played a game at school for educational purposes. Younger teens are also more likely to have played a game at school than older teens: 40% of teens ages 12-14 have played a game at school as part of a school assignment, while 29% of teens ages 15-17 have done so.
From there, researchers asked the students which games they played at school. Interestingly, here the answers got fuzzier:
When asked what games they played in school, many teens said they could not quite remember or that they played “math games” or “typing games.” Thus, we are not able to report on the most commonly played games with a degree of precision, and it was clear that no one game or one kind of game predominated. The games mentioned by five or more teens were: Oregon Trail, Fun Brain, Lemonade Stand, and Roller Coaster Tycoon.
I found it interesting that half those heavily mentioned titles stem from series started in the 1980s, which I blogged about recently here. It reminds me of some research a friend of mine once worked on in a third world country, focusing on non-governmental organizations. People working for the NGOs thought they were doing great, while the locals often held different opinions when answering the same survey questions. I suspect teachers using video games in the classroom could answer specific questions about them better than their students, but this probably holds true for other pedagogical activities as well. What kid remembers the name of any particular intervention? Without casting aspersions on either students, teachers, or the educational video games played, it was an intriguing tidbit.
In summary, this is an important dataset and report on teen gaming that other researchers will want to mine for details. There is something of interest here to anyone focusing on video games. I also liked the attention Lenhart’s team gave to social interaction in gaming, a facet so often overlooked by non-players. The main page for the report is here.
References:
Lenhart, A., Kahne J., Middaugh, E., Macgill, A. R., Evans, C., & Vitak, J. (2008, September 16). Teens, video games, and civics. Pew Internet & American Life Project. [Online]. Available: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/263/report_display.asp
Gaming Statistics, Surveys, Video Game Research | John Rice | 
August 5, 2009 1:08 pm | 
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