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

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  • Aliaksandr Amialchuk
  • Ales Kotalik

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.

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  • Aliaksandr Amialchuk & Ales Kotalik, 2016. "Do Your School Mates Influence How Long You Game? Evidence from the U.S," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(8), pages 1-16, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0160664
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0160664
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Chang Won Jung, 2020. "The role of game genres and gamers’ communication networks in perceived learning," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 6(1), pages 1-8, December.

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