[OES-2-3] Assessing gaming disorder for Taiwanese youths: Psychometric evidence of the Chinese Gaming Disorder Test (GDT)
The issue of gaming disorder (GD) is developing and with growing interests worldwide due to the advances in internet. Accordingly, gaming can be engaged in different modes (offline or online) and without time and space limits. Although gaming may be beneficial if it is used properly as it is good entertainment for people to engage in their leisure activities. Also, some evidence shows that it can help people relax and be useful in some training programs (e.g., physical activity engagement and cognitive training). However, a minority of people may have difficulties in controlling their desire and cravings in gaming engagement. As a result, these minority of people may develop GD and cause further health problems. It is thus important to identify these people and provide early intervention for their GD reduction. Currently, the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) has provided diagnostic criteria for Gaming Disorder (GD). Subsequently, the Gaming Disorder Test (GDT) has been developed to examine if any individuals are at risk of having GD. However, the GDT has never been validated in traditional Chinese version among Taiwanese people. The present study, thus, aimed to translate the GDT and evaluate its psychometric properties among a sample of Taiwanese emerging adults. The GDT was translated into traditional Chinese via standard procedure of forward translation, reconciliation, back translation, expert panel discussion, and cognitive interviewing. After the study protocol was approved by the National Cheng Kung University Human Research Ethics Committee (Approval No. NCKU HREC-E-110-486-2), a series of questions (including GDT, Internet Gaming Disorder Scale - Short Form [IGDS9-SF], and demographic information) were set up on the SurveyMonkey. The online survey on the SurveyMonkey was then distributed to emerging adults (with majority of them as university students either undergraduate or postgraduate) via the assistance of university faculties. The participants had a mean age of 29.10 (SD=6.36) years (N=608; 334 females). All GDT items were normally distributed given that skewness and kurtosis ranged between -0.33 and 1.16. The GDT had excellent internal consistency evidenced by Cronbach’s α (0.90) and a one-factor structure evidenced by the confirmatory factor analysis (comparative fit index=1.000; root mean square error of approximation=0.008). Moreover, the GDT had strong correlations with IGDS9-SF (r=0.78; p<0.001). The results showed that traditional Chinese GDT is a valid and reliable instrument assessing GD among emerging adults Taiwanese emerging adults. Thus, healthcare providers could rely on the GDT to evaluate if a Taiwanese emerging adult is at risk of having GD.