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Next, we examined whether there is a relationship between the conflict ratings
and the quests given to the students. Figure
21.6
shows the average of conflict ratings
submitted by students per quest, across all of the 2,126 reports, as timestamps are
not necessary in this analysis. As the graph shows, students reported higher conflict
levels as the quest number increased with exception of
Quest 2
which produced the
highest conflict level.
Analysis and Discussion
Averaging the conflict ratings across the minutes of
gameplay generates a graph which consists of three bell-shaped curves. Although
individual variances exist, the width of a bell curve generally corresponds to
the duration of a single quest. This finding is consistent with the principles of
Swanstrom and Weissmann (
2005
), suggesting that a conflict experience is expected
to reveal a bell shape in terms of conflict intensity (see Fig.
21.3
). Furthermore, an
analysis on the relationship between the reported conflict ratings and quests reveals
that children felt greater conflict as they received more difficult missions. Increased
conflict intensity in children is in agreement with the principle of our quest design;
that is, higher conflict is induced as the quests advance. It is notable that conflict
intensity peaks at
Quest 2
, even though
Quest 2
should have theoretically been one
of the easier quests amongst the five quests. Given that
Quest 2
is the first quest to
introduce trading between two players (see the quest description in Table
21.1
),
we hypothesize that the high level of conflict was perceived as a result of the
introduction of trading, rather than the inherent difficulty of
Quest 2
.
21.5.3
Student Profile (Age and Gender)
A correlation analysis was carried out to test if the student's profile (i.e. age
and gender) had an impact on her evaluation about a conflict situation. While all
the reports contained valid gender information (number of reports = 2,126), some
reports lacked age information. For the analysis of the relationship between age and
conflict ratings, these reports were eliminated, which resulted in 2,043 valid reports
in total.
The analysis shows a statistically significant difference between genders as
determined by one-way ANOVA (
F
(1,2124) = 229.46,
p D 0:00
) (see Table
21.3
).
On average, female students were shown to report higher conflict ratings than male
students (see Table
21.4
). Moreover, we observe a significant difference between
age groups as determined by one-way ANOVA (
F
(2,2040)
D
115.01,
p D 0:00
)
(see Table
21.5
). A post-hoc Tukey test showed that the conflict ratings reported by
11-year-old students were significantly lower than those reported by students in the
other two age groups at
p D 0:000
, as can be seen from Table
21.6
.
Analysis and Discussion
Gender has been found to be a crucial factor affecting
perception and experience of conflict. In particular, girls reported significantly
higher conflict ratings than did boys. Statistical analysis also revealed that children
of 11 years reported significantly lower ratings than children from the other two
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