By Lucile Orain and Julie Walle
Over the last decade, video games became a huge part of entertainment with an increase of supports, games and goodies available on the market. At the same time, there is a growing field of researches about them, especially the positive and negative effects they can create. Our literature review showed that most of them were quantitative studies and focused on teenagers and adults. Yet, marketing is now targeting children, especially young ones and there is a growing percentage of them that start playing earlier than before. Moreover, the public speech is pejorative and underlines the dangers of playing video games for young children. Parents are overload with recommendations that are sometimes contradictory: video games could lead to autistic symptoms or video games can support the cognitive development.
Our aims were to investigate the representations of both children (age eight to ten) and their parents concerning video game and their organization around it. We also wanted to explore how video game were included to the familial dynamic and how it was a support that could be used to understand familial functioning.
We chose to do a qualitative research. This decision was taken because of the lack of qualitative studies in this area and was also explained by our own interests.
We designed a format of interview divided in three parts. A first part with the children and their parents where they interact about a large question: “what is the place of video game in your family ?” and other possible general questions. A second part with the child only where he shows us his games and eventually plays. And a third part where we continue to explore the themes with the parent. These interviews last approximately one hour and a half and were conducted at the family home.
We recruited families on Facebook groups such as “Apel 44 or “FCPE” which are parental associations. It may have introduced a bias in our study. The parents were already really engaged in their children’s education, they were highly educated and from the upper-class. Moreover, the participation being voluntary, we assume that it would exclude families with a video game problem. Indeed, allowing children to play a lot is associated with guilt in a society that demonize this practice. We had some heated reaction of parents, who played video game, that felt attacked. It appears that we met with people who are opposed to video game and try to monitor their children with planning, time setting and content surveillance.
They were emphasizing the addiction risks, violence, online dangers especially adult malice, loss of temporality, etc. However, as we dug, we also discovered that they were capable understanding their kid needs of playing, they could question their representations and were capable of introspection. We also noticed that there was some social desirability in the answers. Despite this, as the interview was going on, people seemed to gain trust and were more flexible in their opinion. They all were informed about video games either by researches or congress.
Concerning the children, they all bond with the parental speech and didn’t contest the rules even when they wanted to play more. For us, it was due to loyalty toward parents. They tend to play in secret at night or when the parent was not aware. One game seemed pervasive: Fortnite, either the child played it, either he wanted to play. Moreover, online gaming was appealing, it allowed them to play with their friends outside of school and it created subject of discussion in the schoolyard. We linked this aspect with the developmental stage of children between eight and ten. At this period, they develop their cognitive skills and the importance of friendship grows a lot.
Yet, we have not finished our research, we are currently reading for the discussion. We chose to focus on some results such as violence, parental preoccupations and peer influence.
Useful words :
- overload : surcharger
- heated : intense, vif, passionné
- bond : coller, lier
- pervasive : omniprésent
- appealing : attrayant