Eight Hypotheses on Technology Use and Psychosocial Wellbeing: A Bicultural Phenomenological Study of Gaming during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Karhulahti, V.-M., Nerg, H., Laitinen, T., Päivinen, A., & Chen, Y. (2022). Eight Hypotheses on Technology Use and Psychosocial Wellbeing: A Bicultural Phenomenological Study of Gaming during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Current Psychology, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03586-x
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Current PsychologyDate
2022Copyright
© 2022 the Authors
In this nonconfirmatory qualitative study, we pursued a range of hypotheses regarding how gaming operates in the lives and psychosocial wellbeing of those who actively play videogames during a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Informed by an explorative survey (N = 793), interpretive phenomenological analysis was applied to interview data from actively gaming Chinese (n = 10) and Finnish (n = 10) participants. Our findings demonstrate how the general increase of pandemic-time gaming did not manifest in all player groups, but in some life contexts gaming activity rather decreased along with reformations in subjective meaning hierarchies and values. Ultimately, eight subordinate themes were refined into testable hypotheses. The study encourages policies that promote socially supportive gaming during pandemic-like situations to consider including personally meaningful solitary play in their recommendations and highlighting context-specificity over generalization. Finally, as almost all our data points echoing experiences of decreasing gaming activity came from China, we stress the importance of culturally diverse samples in the psychological study of global phenomena.
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Springer Science and Business Media LLCISSN Search the Publication Forum
1046-1310Keywords
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https://converis.jyu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/151769695
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Related funder(s)
Finnish Work Environment Fund; Research Council of FinlandFunding program(s)
Others; Centre of Excellence, AoFAdditional information about funding
Open Access funding provided by University of Jyväskylä (JYU). This study received funding from Academy of Finland (312397) and Finnish Work Environment Fund (200349).License
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