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A location to collaboratively work on an incrementally improving and open definition that can serve to delineate behavioral addictions from healthy, non-problematic forms of behavior. Any and all scholarly contributions to definition development are welcomed. Contributions can be freely added via the wiki, proposals will be discussed and implemented in a transparent manner. Source publications [ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.13763/full ] and [http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/add.13938]

Capítulo 5 - MIL Cities and MIL Citizens: Informed, Engaged, Empowered by Media and Information Literacy (MIL). In understanding and promoting positive outcomes for children’s Internet use, media and information literacies (MILs) play a crucial mediating role, by enabling opportunities for learning, creating, expressing oneself and participating and by facilitating coping and building resilience. This chapter explains the approach adopted by Global Kids Online (GKO), a multinational research partnership, seeking to generate robust evidence that can inform policy and practice regarding children’s internet use in diverse cities and countries internationally. The chapter presents the rationale for GKO’s multidimensional approach to MIL and issues of measurement, social desirability, and cross-national comparison. Additionally, it presents recent findings showing cross-national similarities in higher operational levels than creative skills and differences between higher and lower income countries; it is noteworthy that gender differences in children’s digital skills are found to be minimal. Having shown that the GKO quantitative research toolkit successfully operationalizes the range of MILs also addressed by comparable international frameworks, we recommend the approach to future researchers, concluding with an evidence that GKO’s research results are now being used to inform national policy and practice regarding children’s learning in a digital age.

The paper by Kuss, Griffiths, and Pontes (2016) titled “Chaos and confusion in DSM-5 diagnosis of Internet Gaming Disorder: Issues, concerns, and recommendations for clarity in the field” examines issues relating to the concept of Internet Gaming Disorder. We agree that there are serious issues and extend their arguments by suggesting that the field lacks basic theory, definitions, patient research, and properly validated and standardized assessment tools. As most studies derive data from survey research in functional populations, they exclude people with severe functional impairment and provide only limited information on the hypothesized disorder. Yet findings from such studies are widely used and often exaggerated, leading many to believe that we know more about the problem behavior than we do. We further argue that video game play is associated with several benefits and that formalizing this popular hobby as a psychiatric disorder is not without risks. It might undermine children’s right to play or encourage repressive treatment programs, which ultimately threaten children’s right to protection against violence. While Kuss et al. (2016) express support for the formal implementation of a disorder, we argue that before we have a proper evidence base, a sound theory, and validated assessment tools, it is irresponsible to support a formal category of disorder and doing so would solidify a confirmatory approach to research in this area.

We greatly appreciate the care and thought that is evident in the ten commentaries that discuss our debate paper, the majority of which argued in favor of a formalized ICD-11 gaming disorder. We agree that there are some people whose play of video games is related to life problems. We believe that understanding this population and the nature and severity of the problems they experience should be a focus area for future research. However, moving from research construct to formal disorder requires a much stronger evidence base than we currently have. The burden of evidence and the clinical utility should be extremely high because there is a genuine risk of abuse of diagnoses. We provide suggestions about the level of evidence that might be required: transparent and preregistered studies, a better demarcation of the subject area that includes a rationale for focusing on gaming in particular versus a more general behavioral addictions concept, the exploration of non-addiction approaches, and the unbiased exploration of clinical approaches that treat potentially underlying issues such as depressive mood or social anxiety first. We acknowledge there could be benefits to formalizing gaming disorder, many of which were highlighted by colleagues in their commentaries, but we think they do not yet outweigh the wider societal and public health risks involved. Given the gravity of diagnostic classification and its wider societal impact, we urge our colleagues at the WHO to err on the side of caution for now and postpone the formalization.

This case presents the Global Kids Online research model, revealing the challenges of researching children’s internet and mobile use in a global context, and providing practical methodological solutions. With most available research conducted in the global North while most growth in the population of young internet users is occurring in the global South, researchers are faced with the challenge of creating research tools that are both context-sensitive, yet able to capture children’s experiences of the internet on a global scale, and that allow for robust cross-country comparative approaches. The Global Kids Online methodology is designed for children aged 9-17 who use the internet at least minimally and for adult respondents (the children’s parents or carers). It includes a survey of parents and children, and individual and group interviews with children. The Global Kids Online project was developed as a collaborative initiative between the London School of Economics and Political Science, the UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, and the EU Kids Online network to address this need for a robust global evidence base on children’s online opportunities and risks, and their effects on children’s well-being and rights, which can be used to inform national and international policy, regulation, and practice

Following the recent changes to the diagnostic category for addictive disorders in DSM-5, it is urgent to clarify what constitutes behavioural addiction to have a clear direction for future research and classification. However, in the years following the release of DSM-5, an expanding body of research has increasingly classified engagement in a wide range of common behaviours and leisure activities as possible behavioural addiction. If this expansion does not end, both the rel- evance and the credibility of the field of addictive disorders might be questioned, which may prompt a dismissive appraisal of the new DSM-5 subcategory for behavioural addiction. We propose an operational definition of behavioural addiction together with a number of exclusion criteria, to avoid pathologizing common behaviours and provide a common ground for further research. The definition and its exclusion criteria are clarified and justified by illustrating how these address a number of theoretical and methodological shortcomings that result from existing conceptualizations. We invite other researchers to extend our definition under an Open Science Foundation framework.

Internet-related policy is a topic of fierce global debate, with questions such as, should it be national or international, who should oversee it, what should it relate to, how should it be developed and who should be the main stakeholders? When it comes to children and the internet, things are particularly complex as policies related to child rights tend to be scattered across different domains (health, education, welfare and justice), and are not always linked to broad public policy objectives related to the digital economy, digital society or to internet governance. This Guide examines the relationship between research and policy in this area, and supports researchers to frame their objectives and findings in ways that (directly or indirectly) support policy development processes that affect children. We start by examining the current policy landscape related to children and the internet, and the key issues and drivers behind these policies. We then make concrete suggestions and recommendations about how to ensure evidence is relevant and used to facilitate the policy-making process.

The qualitative toolkit comprises the research instruments that will help you design, carry out, and analyse the qualitative research on children’s online risks and opportunities. These are designed in a way that allows covering the key topics identified by Global Kids Online, as well as remaining flexible and following up on issues that children raise.

The Global Kids Online research toolkit has been developed with country partners, experts, and international advisors. The Getting started guide introduces the research principles and resources.

Concerns about problematic gaming behaviors deserve our full attention. However, we claim that it is far from clear that these problems can or should be attributed to a new disorder. The empirical basis for a Gaming Disorder proposal, such as in the new ICD-11, suffers from fundamental issues. Our main concerns are the low quality of the research base, the fact that the current operationalization leans too heavily on substance use and gambling criteria, and the lack of consensus on symptomatology and assessment of problematic gaming. The act of formalizing this disorder, even as a proposal, has negative medical, scientific, public-health, societal and human rights fallout that should be considered. Of particular concern are moral panics around the harm of video gaming. They might result in premature application of diagnosis in the medical community and the treatment of abundant false-positive cases, especially for children and adolescents. Secondly, research will be locked into a confirmatory approach, rather than an exploration of the boundaries of normal versus pathological. Thirdly, the healthy majority of gamers will be affected negatively. We expect that the premature inclusion of Gaming Disorder as a diagnosis in ICD-11 will cause significant stigma to the millions of children who play video games as part of a normal, healthy life. At this point, suggesting formal diagnoses and categories is premature: the ICD-11 proposal for Gaming Disorder should be removed to avoid a waste of public health resources as well as to avoid causing harm to healthy video gamers around the world.