Utilização de videogames violentos e envolvimento em situações de bullying/cyberbullying

Abstract

Bullying/cyberbullying, are important manifestations of violence that require care, especially with regard to the negative consequences for the for everyone involved. Therefore, it is important to study, know and understand how other factors and behaviors relate to bullying/cyberbullying. In this way, video games, especially violent ones, have received attention and the theme of this thesis is the use of violent video games and involvement in bullying/cyberbullying situations. This thesis is divided into three papers, the article one is a systematic literature review. Twenty-one articles were selected, the results observed were conflicting, since 15 articles corroborate the existence of the relationship and five do not. It is concluded that there is still no consensus on the existence or not of a correlation between violent games and bullying/cyberbullying, however some studies show evidence for a positive correlation between the variables. In the article two the main objective is to verify and explore the existence of a correlation between the use of violent video games and involvement with bullying. The research is divided into two parts, the first is quantitative and consists of the application of three questionnaires answered by 97 students of elementary school. The second part consists of the execution of semi-structured interviews with eight of these students. Both studies showed that video games take up a lot of time in students' daily lives. Although the time of exposure and the content present in the games must be monitored by parents or guardians. In general, the results indicate that the use of violent video games is related to involvement in bullying in the three methods applied to evaluate the violent game despite the frequency of use, especially with regard to the aggressors. The article three in order to investigate the relationship between violent video game use and involvement with cyberbullying, a multivariate analysis was used to develop a probabilistic model using binary logistic regression, to identify variables related to the probability of being a victim or aggressor in the cyberbullying context. Data from 283 undergraduates throughout Brazil was gathered through an online survey. It was observed that both university victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying are younger, started playing video games earlier, play more often and have a higher rating of use of violent games by the three criteria used. Within the multivariate analysis, it was observed that the highest probability of being a victim of cyberbullying occurs in university students with the highest sum of violent games using the ESRB content descriptors and considering the frequency of use of the games. For aggressors, it was observed that the highest probability of being a cyberbullying aggressor occurs in single university students, who use drugs, started playing video games earlier, and have a greater sum of violent games by the ESRB descriptors considering the frequency of use about the game. It is believed that this thesis is an initial step, which seeks to collaborate with the elucidation of the issue of violent video games and bullying/cyberbullying in the national context. There is a need for further research dedicated to the subject to be developed and for the evaluation of the use of violent video games to be debated. There are still many questions that need to be answered and this demands efforts for new studies to be carried out.