Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="apoptosis" data-source="post: 4901278" data-attributes="member: 3226">Somehow my post got lost in the ether...arrrghhhI tried to obtain this article but it looks like it is in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and the epub is not yet available. Unfortunately the current trend is to release the results to the news media before the data is released in the journal. It is probably available at some scientific conference as a poster but I am too lazy to track it down. I will review it once it is available to see what the methods and results actually were.I am pretty sure that the authors though are very aware of the difference between causation and correlation. It generally gets hammered into you and any of the papers reviewers will have brought this up in case the paper implied otherwise.As far as to whether 100 people are enough to make  a strong correlation claim that really depends on the effect size of the correlation that we are looking at. If (picking numbers from my southern regions) 70% of gamers are depressed compared to say 5% (approximately the point prevalence for major depression) of the general populace then you probably have a sample size large enough to conclude that the relationship is statistically significant. You can really look at statistical significance in a vacuum just based off the study population size, it really requires that you know what effect size you are estimating.I am curious as to how they identified depression as that can really impact the conclusion of the study. There is a big difference between asking the participants "are you or have you been depressed in the past year" versus diagnosing them using DSM-IV (the psychiatric criteria) criteria for major depression versus using some other screening tool. Similar to this is whether the screening tool was patient-based or did it require a trained screener and were they lookign for depressive symptoms versus an actual depressive disorder.When the paper come out it will be an interesting read i hope.The results though do agree with some other studies that have shown associtations between online gaming and anxiety and depression. One study actually showed changes in brain function when playing a violent video game (WOW during violent interactions), but all these studies have been very small and require way more work to really understand the phenomena.My .02Apop</blockquote>

Verification