Research on Video Games and College Students

For last six months, I was helping the communication department of Harbin Institute of Technology to do the research related to video games. My neighbor in China, Xing, is the professor of the communication department at that university. Based on my language advantage, SPSS skills and studying abroad experience, Xing recommended me to join their video game research group. In order to explore the relationship between college students' learning burnouts and video game addiction, we got started to design questionnaire. The whole research group was trying to lower the bias on questionnaire as much as possible. I used the knowledge of SPSS which learned in COM 304 at Purdue University to analyze the statistics. According to our results of six month’s research, there were significant difference in the gender, majors and grades among college students with video game addiction and college students with other type of internet addiction. Our conclusion is that there is significant relationship between the internet addiction tendency of college students with online game addiction and learning burnouts.
During our research process, we found that one phenomenon is worthy of our serious attention. That is, because of the Chinese traditional education system, college students have lots of available time other than studying. The Chinese colleges accept students very strictly. However, once students entered into colleges, they can graduate easily without working hard. This is very different from American Universities. Because I am studying in the U.S. now, I can tell so many differences between Chinese education systems and America’s. Without many things to work on, Chinese college students have the tendency to play video games to kill the time.
Our research team leader asked us, “Should we change the Chinese education system from now on? My son in Cornell University is always studying! But Chinese college students have lots of time to play video games”