Investigating the Relationship between Consumption of Computer Games and School Bullying among Elementary Students

Turnover of the video game industry is three times larger than the cinema. Students are the most consumer of this market. Games in addition to theirs benefits can causes many problems as Increasing violence. The study seeks to investigate the using rate of violent games and its relationship with the amount and type of bullying of elementary school male and female students in Bojnord. Data were collected through two questionnaires: Illinois bullying scale and a researcher-made game questionnaire. Findings showed that the rate of violent games among boys is significantly higher than girls. And the rate of bullying fights and victimization is higher among boys too. Contrary to expectations, the most important finding showed that there is a negative relationship between playing violent games with the dimension of bullying, the dimension of fighting and the dimension of victimization that in first two is meaningful. That is, games not only didn’t have a significant relationship with increasing violence, on the contrary have with reducing it. There are theories that can explain this finding, so that these games calm children by discharging the latent violence and therefore have a positive effect on their behavior; especially if the conditions and lifestyle were how they couldn't experience in real environment. The findings of this study, although challenging the mainstream, do not recommend the use of violent games to reduce school bullying; because moral, psychological and physical harms still remain, moreover there are other ways to prevent and reduce bullying at school.