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Abstract

V ideo gaming addiction is a serious issue that is rapidly grasping the attention of the media, health care professionals, and researchers. This relatively new behavioral addiction has yet to establish a foundational body of knowledge, agreed upon terminology, and gold standard measures. The purpose of this paper was to explore adolescent video gaming addiction in urban and rural regions of Ontario. Data was collected from 9288 Ontario students where half were randomly selected to answer questions on video game use. The Problem of Videogame Playing Scale was embedded within those questions. The results of this paper found that 76.6% of adolescents in Toronto (urban area) and 80.3% of adolescents in Northern Ontario (rural area) had played video games within the past year. In Toronto, 16.7% of adolescent gamers were addicted to gaming while 8.8% of adolescent gamers in Northern Ontario were addicted to gaming. Adolescents in urban regions are significantly more likely than adolescents in rural regions to be addicted to gaming. Adolescent males were almost six times more likely to be addicted compared to adolescents who had similar characteristics in mental health status and grade who were females. Mental health status was related to the chance of being addicted to gaming: those who scored 1 point higher on the 12-item General Health Questionnaire were 1.12 times more likely to be addicted to gaming. Implications for the gaming industry, health care professionals, caregivers of adolescents, and policy will be discussed

Biography

Jing Shi is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto. She completed her Honors BHSc from the University of Western Ontario and MSc in occupational therapy from McMaster University. She has extensive work experience as an occupational therapist that augments her current research in Internet gaming addictions. She has publications related to gaming and she is an active participant at international conferences in addictions