Question

To measure amount of violent video game play, participants were asked to name their three favorite video games, to indicate how often they play each video game (on a scale from 1 = sometimes to 7 = very often), and to rate how violent the content of each video game was (on a scale from 1=not at all to 7=very). As in previous research (e.g., Anderson & Dill, 2000; Greitemeyer, 2014), for each video game, the frequency of game play was multiplied by violent content. These three violent video game exposure scores were then summed to provide a measure of the amount of violent video game play.

The expanded version of the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies (Buckels & Paulhus, 2014) was used to assess everyday sadism, which contains 18 items. A sample item is: “I was purposely mean to some people in high school.” To measure narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, we used the Dirty Dozen, with four items per subscale (Jonason & Webster, 2010). Sample items are: “I tend to want others to pay attention to me” (narcissism), “I have used deceit or lied to get my way“ (Machiavellianism), and “I tend to be cynical“ (psychopathy). Both sadistic tendencies and the Dark Triad items were assessed on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). To measure trait aggression, participants responded to the short version of the Buss and Perry aggression questionnaire (Bryant & Smith, 2001),which contains 12 items (e.g., “I have threatened people I know.”) These items were assessed on a scale from 1 (very unlike me) to 5 (very like me). To measure the Big 5, a brief version was employed (Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003). There are two items per scale. Some scale reliabilities were relatively poor, which is a typical psychometric cost of using short measures (Gosling et al., 2003). The Big 5 items were assessed on a scale from 1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (strongly agree.

All measures are shown in Table 1. In support of our central hypothesis, violent video game play was positively associated with everyday sadism at both times of measurement. In addition, amount of violent video game play was consistently positively associated with trait aggression and the Dark Triad and was negatively associated with agreeableness

1. What kind of study design is this (experimental or correlational)?
2. If experimental, what is the independent variable?

3. If experimental, what is the dependent variable?

4. What kind of statistical test did the author run, and how do you know the used this test?

5. What do you think the null and alternative hypotheses are in this study? You might have to guess, but make them educated guesses!

Answer 1

(a) This is correlational study design because in this study the researcher seeks to understand what kind of relationships naturally occurring variables have with one another.

(b) Independent variables: amount of violent video game play measured as three favorite video games and how often they play

(c) Dependent variable: everyday sadism and trait aggression

(d) Statistical test: Association of attributes

(e) H0:Null Hypothesis: everyday sadism and trait aggression is related to amount of violent video game play

HA:Alternative Hypothesis: everyday sadism and trait aggression is not related to amount of violent video game play