Lunchtime seminar: Muya Koloko

12:45 - 14:00 SAST
The Centre for Social Sciences Research (CSSR) and the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa (IDCPPA) at the University of Cape Town invite you to join us for a lunchtime seminar on 11 March 2025 at 12:45pm. The seminar will be presented by Muya Koloko.
About the Seminar:
"This will never happen in real life": Local tweens' responses to violence in digital games
Research into video game violence has often continued the tradition of gauging whether children being exposed to representations of violence will internalise/imitate the violence. Rarely have studies examined children's perspectives on violence, especially in the Global South or countries with high rates of violent crime such as South Africa. In addressing how tweens (children aged between ten and twelve) from low to mid socioeconomic backgrounds responded to video game violence, a sequential exploratory mixed methods design was implemented.
Qualitative data revealed access and preference differences by gender and location. Violence in video games was accepted as fictional and justified by the narrative and rules in the video game, which often included a backstory that justified violence as retaliation. Such retaliatory violence was the focus of a subsequent quantitative survey administered to a larger sample of children (n = 217), which investigated potential congruence between support for retaliatory violence in video games and in their life-worlds. A moderate positive correlation was found between support for retaliatory violence in video games and in life, suggesting that the ideas of acceptability of violence presented in video games are not internalised by most children. Merged, the findings reflect the nuances of children's experiences with video game violence and suggest that contextual cues from the video games played, peers and caregivers shape how children perceive video game violence.
Speakers
Dr. Christian Connell is the Ken Young Family Professor for Healthy Children in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State and Director of the Child Maltreatment Solutions Network. He co-leads Penn State's federally funded Translational Center for Child Maltreatment Studies. Dr. Connell earned his Ph.D. in Clinical-Community Psychology from the University of South Carolina and trained at Yale School of Medicine, where he was a faculty member for 15 years before joining Penn State. With over 25 years of experience, he researches how individual, family, and contextual factors affect child behavioral health and wellbeing following maltreatment or child welfare involvement, as well as community-based strategies for trauma prevention. His work, often using linked administrative data, has been funded by major federal agencies, including NIH, ACF, and the National Traumatic Stress Network, along with state and local grants.
11 March 2025
12:45 - 14:00 SAST
CSSR Seminar Room, 4.29 Robert Leslie Social Science Building, UCT
Hosted by the Centre for Social Science Research and the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa