Abstract

• The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of game addiction on aggressive behaviour among university students in Sagaing District. The quantitative research design and descriptive survey method were used in this study. A total of 554 university students from four universities were selected as participants by using simple random sampling technique. As research instruments, Game Addiction Scale (Lemmens, Valkenburg & Peter, 2009) and Aggression Questionnaire (Faris, Ishak & Ramli, 2016) were used to measure students’ game addiction and aggressive behaviour. According to the result of descriptive statistics, it can be said that the students were moderately addicted to playing games. Next, t test indicated that there were significant differences in both overall game addiction and in subscales of game addiction between male and female students. Furthermore, significant difference was also found in total aggressive behaviour by gender in which females were significantly higher than male students (t=-2.478, p<0.05). Although there was no significant difference in overall game addiction by university, significant differences was found in total aggressive behaviour among game players. Moreover, Pearson Product Moment Correlation revealed that game addiction of university students was significantly correlated with their aggressive behaviour (r = .342, p<0.001). According to multiple regression analyses, it was revealed that game addiction was key predictor on aggressive behaviour. Therefore, it is hoped that this study may provide a lot of information to the teachers, parents and administrators concerning how the students can be addictive to playing games and the effect of students’ game addiction on aggressive behaviour.