Disordered gaming, loneliness, and family harmony in gamers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dmitri Rozgonjuk; Halley M Pontes; Bruno Schivinski; Christian Montag

doi:10.1016/j.abrep.2022.100426

Disordered gaming, loneliness, and family harmony in gamers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Addict Behav Rep. 2022 Jun:15:100426. doi: 10.1016/j.abrep.2022.100426. Epub 2022 Apr 12.

Authors

Dmitri Rozgonjuk^{1

2}, Halley M Pontes³, Bruno Schivinski⁴, Christian Montag¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Molecular Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany.
² Institute of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
³ Department of Organizational Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom.
⁴ School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate if and how disordered gaming, loneliness, and family relations have changed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (from 2019 to 2021), and whether there were any changes in the association between these variables across three samples of gamers (for each respective year). Samples from 2019, 2020, and 2021 were matched by using propensity score matching across socio-demographic characteristics. The total effective sample comprised 897 gamers (N = 299 per year). These samples were compared in terms of disordered gaming - separately as Gaming Disorder (GD; WHO framework) and Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD; APA framework), loneliness, and family harmony scores with analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs), with age and gender as covariates. Steiger tests were used for correlation differences testing. ANCOVAs showed that while GD and IGD scores have increased significantly during the pandemic years, loneliness and family harmony did not change significantly. Furthermore, the correlation differences tests indicated that the correlations between both IGD and GD with loneliness as well as poorer family harmony have increased during the pandemic years. This study provides empirical evidence that the well-being of gamers might have been negatively affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. While loneliness and family harmony did not increase, the stronger correlations between Gaming Disorder and other variables might suggest that gaming may have been used to cope with loneliness and poorer family harmony.

Keywords: COVID-19; Family harmony; Gaming disorder; Internet gaming disorder; Loneliness; Pandemic.