PVP Questionnaire: What It Is And How It Is Used To Detect Video Game Addiction
In recent years, The consumption of digital entertainment, especially video games, has become widely popular that has come to break generational barriers.
Candy Crash, Fortnite, Pokémon Go, World of Warcraft are just one of the few video game titles that have a large group of fans among children, adolescents and adults, who dedicate several hours a day to them.
Enjoying this type of entertainment is fine and age should not be an obstacle to enjoying this leisure. But everything should be done in moderation, otherwise problems may arise. Today it is considered that a large percentage of the population, especially among adolescents, plays video games in an addictive way, causing problems in the sphere of studies, work, family and social relationships.
This is not new. Decades ago, the possibility of addictive behaviors arising with respect to new technologies was raised. That is why in the early 2000s one of the first tools was developed to measure the severity of this type of problem: the PVP quiz
We are going to explain what this questionnaire consists of, what the background was that led to its development, in addition to mentioning some research that has used it and some of its notable psychometric properties.
The PVP questionnaire, whose name in English is Problem Video Game Playing Questionnaire, is the first psychological instrument designed for the evaluation of problems derived from video game abuse This questionnaire can include any type of video game from any type of console, whether portable (game boy), desktop (PlayStation) or arcade (recreational machines).
This tool was announced in 2002 in the magazine Addiction, its authors being psychology professors Ricardo A. Tejeiro Salguero, from the University of Liverpool, and Rosa M. Bersabé Morán, from the University of Málaga.
The PVP Quiz was based on the review of several of the DSM-IV criteria for disorders associated with substance dependence and pathological gambling At the beginning of the 2000s, there was still a fairly limited vision of what was understood as gambling addiction. Although the problems that could be caused by the abuse of video games were already suspected, pathological gambling continued to be seen as something exclusive to casinos and slot machines.
That is why the application of instruments such as the PVP questionnaire and others that were developed later are appropriate to know, quantitatively, how serious the problem can be with video games, but without the need to establish a specific diagnosis
However, given the growing use of video games in youth, researchers and the APA and WHO themselves considered the need to include the abuse of this type of entertainment within addictions. It should be said that, to this day, there is still controversy about whether the problems associated with new technologies, video games and the Internet should be considered addictions themselves, and put them in the same category as alcoholism and abuse of other substances.
In fact, while the WHO in ICD-11 has included a disorder related to this type of addiction (gaming disorder), The APA did not consider it appropriate to include something similar in the development of the DSM-5, considering that there was not enough evidence to form the diagnostic label for Internet gaming disorder.
Psychologists Ricardo A. Tejeiro Salguero and Rosa M. Bersabé Morán saw, in the early 2000s, that relatively little research had been carried out in the field of pathological behaviors associated with video game abuse.
Although at that time it was beginning to be pointed out that abusing new technologies could lead to addictive situations, accompanied by antisocial behavior and loss of large amounts of money, The research of the time had been limited, for the most part, to seeing the number of hours people dedicated to this type of entertainment
At that time, it was not at all clear what proportion of adolescents could be considered ‘addicted’ to this type of leisure. Studies such as that of Brooks in 1983 suggested that they must be a minority, while others, such as Egli and Meyers in 1984, said that, in the population, percentages of between 10 and 15% of players addicted to video games could be expected.
Given the lack of diagnostic criteria for this type of behavior and the lack of adequate tools to measure them, Tejeiro Salguero and Bersabé Morán proceeded to develop the PVP questionnaire based on criteria from the fourth edition of the DSM and several studies from the eighties and nineties that had laid the foundations for measuring this type of problem in a timid way.
Research
Given the importance that the PVP questionnaire acquired after its publication in the journal Addiction in 2003, this tool has been used in multiple subsequent investigations. The questionnaire is considered a reference when measuring video game abuse, such as the Beck Inventory for depression or the WAIS test for intelligence. It should be said that it has been used both in its original version and with small modifications, either for reasons of languages or cultural differences.
To date, there are more than thirty published studies in which this questionnaire has been used, taking samples from several countries: Spain, France, Iceland, United States, Canada, Chile, Australia, Thailand, Brazil, Peru and the United Kingdom. between many more.
Psychometric properties
A recent systematic review of questionnaires related to addictions to new technologies, specifically the one carried out by the group of Daniel L. King and company in 2013, concluded that the PVP questionnaire is the best instrument to address addictions associated with the abuse of video games and also from Internet addiction.
In 2002, when Tejeiro Salguero and Bersabé Morán carried out the validation study, they administered this questionnaire to some 223 adolescents from the cities of Granada capital and La Línea de la Concepción. When the factor analysis was carried out, it was concluded that it was a unidimensional test.
Internal consistency was acceptable despite having a limited number of items, obtaining a Crombach alpha coefficient of 0.67. Given this, any adaptations that can be made to this questionnaire must be done with great care, especially if its quantity is reduced, given that it would lose internal consistency.
