Trepte, S., Reineck, L., & Juechems, K. (May 2012). The social side of gaming: How playing online computer games creates online and offline social support. Computers in Human Behavior, 28, 832-839. Retrieved from http://lib-proxy.purduecal.edu:2092/science/article/pii/S0747563211002706
Trepte, Reineck & Juechems (2012) performed analysis of the correlations between factors of building social capital as they apply to online gaming contexts and the strengthening of offline social support. Their research is built off of that of multiple others in the field who have researched online gaming's influence on the social lives of gamers. They take into account the factors of physical proximity, social proximity (i.e. "how close people are in terms of mutual availability and accessibility") and familiarity ("frequency of interpersonal exposure"), and analyze statistical data collected from hundreds of gamers who participate in e-sports "clans" (groups of gamers who frequently work together toward accomplishing tasks) to find correlations between these factors and the strength of their offline social support.
I am, as of yet, not entirely sure what to think of their findings. While they did, through path analysis of their Linkert-type-scale data collection, prove each of their hypotheses true regarding positive (and one negative) links among the factors of online social capital and offline socialization, it is still a bit of a stretch to fully trust purely statistical analysis on so personal a matter as friendship and social bonds. As a bit of relief, however, they do in fact recognize this limitation on their studies: "To increase the reliability and validity of the measures, items referring to overt patterns of behavior. . .or observable forms of social interaction within the clan. . .rather than subjective feelings. . .were applied. We believe that these behavior-based items provide reliable and valid measures of the respective constructs. At the same time, however, the breadth of the used indicators is limited: involvement in clan administration, for example, is by no means the only indicator of social proximity." To this end they recommend, for further research, replication of this study with "additional
empirical indicators of these theoretical constructs".
However, considering my lack of experience with the path analysis method, I certainly must do further studying on the concept and process of this kind of analysis before I make overt judgments on the validity of their findings. As it lies now, however, I find this study to be, for the most part, rather credible. For one point, its very nature of being a peer-reviewed journal article gives it plenty of reliability. However, I did catch a couple of typos that made this stance a slight bit uneasy (". . .a significant statistical relationship between theses three variables. . ." & "These results have practical implications that could proof beneficial. . .") As far as accuracy is concerned, from the studies I have already read which they referenced, I believe they used their sources quite accurately and efficiently, though there was one particular spot (near the beginning of p.385) where they use a quote from Steinkuehler & Williams that--at least for me, as a reader--somewhat out-of-place, or even contradictory to the point they are trying to make in that section. Though perhaps that may be nothing more than a reading comprehension failure on my part. The article is as-of-now quite current, being published in its journal just last year (2012), and the majority of its sources are from post-2000. I believe the article is also quite objective enough, as it does present multiple differing viewpoints from other studies done on this subject, and its analysis is through pure data pathing.
This comment is for both posts. In the future, it would be best if you did one journal assignment in the same post.
ReplyDeleteThis is good--I especially like the way your point out the typos in the second source. That's important, and relates to the "writing style" component of CAPOW we talked about in class a couple of weeks. ago. I would have liked to have seen more analysis of credibility in your first source. For example, rather than just saying the author seemed down to earth, talk about who he was. If there is no author's bio anywhere in/on the book, mention that, because it might indicate a lack of credibility. And you should also Google the author, if it doesn't say, to get a feel for his/her credibility. Your APA is also a little off on the first post, because you forgot the publisher.
This blog post was late--you were supposed to have posted it by 11:59 on Sunday, but this was posted early Monday morning. Just this once, I'll accept it, but I have to take points off. In the future, I won't accept any blog posts that are posted after the date/time it is due.