Assessing the symptoms of Internet Gaming Disorder among college/university students

Looking for a scale to measure symptoms of Gaming disorder (GD) in college/university students (i.e., the ICMH-IGD scale), our study demonstrated three essential things: nine item-symptoms representing a single factor of the Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) according to the DSM-5 is possible to measure, the ICMH-IGD scale is measuring IGD/GD invariantly in both genders, and symptom-items preoccupation with online gaming, loss of interest in previous hobbies and entertainment, and the use of gaming to relieve negative moods are perceived similarly across different languages.

The present study evaluated the psychometric properties of a self-report scale for assessing Internet gaming disorder (IGD) symptoms according to the DSM-5 and ICD-11 among 3270 college/university students (2095 [64.1%] females; age mean 21.6 [3.1] years) from different countries worldwide. It was tested the Croatian, English, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Turkish, and Vietnamese version of the scale. The study confirmed that the symptoms of IGD could be measured as a single underlying factor among college/university students. A nine-item-symptom scale following DSM-5, and a short four-item scale representing the main ICD-11 symptoms, had good internal consistency and discriminant validity. In addition, three symptom-items were found non-invariant across the language samples (i.e., preoccupation with online gaming, loss of interest in previous hobbies and entertainment, and the use of gaming to relieve negative moods). This study provides initial evidence for assessing IGD symptoms among college/university students. It fosters further research into gaming addiction in this population worldwide, especially considering language/cultural differences.

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