Do Your School Mates Influence How Long You Game? Evidence from the U.S

Aliaksandr Amialchuk; Ales Kotalik

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0160664

Do Your School Mates Influence How Long You Game? Evidence from the U.S

PLoS One. 2016 Aug 5;11(8):e0160664. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160664. eCollection 2016.

Authors

Aliaksandr Amialchuk¹, Ales Kotalik²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Economics, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, United States of America.
² Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to estimate peer influence in video gaming time among adolescents. Using a nationally representative sample of the U.S. school-aged adolescents in 2009-2010, we estimate a structural model that accounts for the potential biases in the estimate of the peer effect. Our peer group is exogenously assigned and includes one year older adolescents in the same school grade as the respondent. The peer measure is based on peers' own reports of video gaming time. We find that an additional one hour of playing video games per week by older grade-mates results in .47 hours increase in video gaming time by male responders. We do not find significant peer effect among female responders. Effective policies aimed at influencing the time that adolescents spend video gaming should take these findings into account.

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Adolescent Behavior*
Female
Games, Recreational / psychology*
Humans
Male
Parent-Child Relations
Peer Influence*
Psychometrics
Schools
Students / psychology*
Time Factors
United States
Video Games / psychology*

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.