The Mechanism of Escaping Self-Discrepancy Through Video Gaming and College Students' Academic Commitment

• In Event: Research on Self-Regulated Learning Poster Session

Abstract

Video gaming is becoming a common entertainment among college students. While video gaming helps students escape from negative feelings from daily life, it could affect their academics. 936 undergraduate students from a large public university participated in this study. The results indicated that students’ engagement in video games and actual-ideal self-discrepancy correlate with escapism, but no correlation was found between self-discrepancy and video game playing. Specially, the relationship between escapism and self-discrepancy is only found significant among students who have high engagement in video games, whereas the same relationship was not significant for students who are low in video game engagement. Also, students' self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship between video game escapism and academic commitment.

Authors

• Huajian Gao, The University of Texas at Austin

• Yiwen Yang, University of Texas at Austin

• Jiahua Yang, The University of Texas at Austin