Validity and Reliability Assessment of the Game Addiction Scale

Abstract

The game addiction scale (GAS) by Lemmens, Valkenburg, and Peter is a popular tool that is frequently used to evaluate game playing by adolescents. The scale that showed high reliabilities was tested on 644 gamers in the Netherlands. The GAS consists of 21 items that are divided into seven criteria, i.e., salience, tolerance, mood modification, relapse, withdrawal, conflict, and problems. This research attempted to investigate the scale in gamers in Indonesia in order to validate and to make a generalization of the GAS. A total of 360 respondents who are gamers have been chosen to participate in this study. They have to play the game for the last six months. Note that the massively multiplayer online role-playing game is chosen for this research since this type of game is very popular among the gamers in Indonesia. Results showed that the GAS demonstrated excellent internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha scores for all variables are more than 0.6). Furthermore, the factor analysis revealed good psychometric properties and fit the data well. These indicate that the GAS can be used to assess game addiction for Indonesian gamers due to its demonstrated psychometric validity.