The Effectiveness of Family Education on Digital Game Addiction

Harmful use of digital technologies is increasing among different age groups in society, especially children. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to this issue and educate families to empower them to deal with this issue properly. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of family education on digital game addiction. The method of the present study was quasi-experimental with pre-test-post-test design and witness group. The statistical population of this study included male students of the fourth and fifth grades of Farid School in Ramsar city in the academic year of 2019-2020. Those had a cut point above 90 in Videogame Addiction Scale for Children (VASC) were selected and randomly assigned to experimental (n = 20) and witness (n = 20) groups. First, in the pre-test stage, the Videogame Addiction Scale for Children (Yilmatz, Griffiths, & Ken, 2017) was performed on both groups. The experimental group then takes a family education course. At the end of the training period, post-test was performed again in both groups and the data were analyzed using analysis of covariance and SPSS software version 24. The results showed that the mean of digital game addiction and its components in the experimental group decreased significantly compared to the control group (p <0.05). According to the findings, it can be concluded that family education is effective in reducing addiction to digital games. Therefore, designing and implementing training courses for families can be helpful in reducing their children's harmful use of such new electronic technologies.