Spanish Validation and Scoring of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale - Short-Form (IGDS9-SF)

Abstract

Since the inclusion of the Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.) (DSM-5), the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale-Short Form (IGDS9-SF), a short nine items test, has become one of the most used standardized instruments for its psychometric evaluation. This study presents a validation and psychometric evaluation of the Spanish version of the IGDS9-SF. A sample of 2173 videogame players between 12 and 22 years old, comprising both genders, was employed, achieved with a randomized selection process from educational institutions in the city of Madrid. Participants completed the adapted version of the IGDS9-SF, the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) and a negative cognitions scale associated with videogame use, as well as sociodemographic data and frequency of videogame play. A unifactorial structure with sufficient reliability and internal consistency was found through exploratory and confirmatory analyses. In addition, the instrument was found to have good construct validity; the scoring of the IGDS9-SF were found to show a positive association with gaming frequency, with general health problems, and to a greater extent, with problematic cognitions with regard to videogames. Factorial invariance was found concerning the age of participants. However, even though the factorial structure was consistent across genders, neither metric nor scalar invariance were found; for this reason, we present a scale for the whole sample and a different one for gender. These results suggest that this Spanish version of the IGDS9-SF is a reliable and valid instrument, useful to evaluate the severity of IGD in Spanish students, and we provide a scoring scale for measurement purposes.

Women and videogames: What do they play?

“…Finally, the average value on the IGDS9-SF, 13.51, is low and only 3 out of the 1228 women (.02%) and out of the 626 who played VG (.47%) exceeded the cut-off score of 36 points suggested by Pontes & Griffith (2015), whereas the percentage rises to 1.7% if 27 is used as cut-off. As it was expected the scores found in this sample of women are below those of men, suggesting less problems with the use of VG (Rehbein et al, 2016;Sánchez-Iglesias et al, 2020). In the study of Witteck et al, (2016) men were found to be 2.9 times more likely to have problems with VG than women; in the study of Bonnaire and Baptista (2019), almost 4 times more.…”

Psychometric Validation of the Spanish Gaming Disorder Test (GDT): Item Response Theory and Measurement Invariance Analysis

“…Taking together, the results on the validity and reliability allow us to conclude that the Spanish GDT is an adequate psychometric test to assess GD within the Spanish population, reaching similar promising results than those found with the Spanish version of the Spanish IGDS9-SF (Beranuy et al, 2020 ; Maldonado-Murciano et al, 2020 ; Sánchez-Iglesias et al, 2020 ). Since the Spanish IGDS9-SF assesses disordered gaming under the APA framework, the present Spanish GDT represents a better assessment option for health professionals and clinicians alike when conducting assessment of disordered gaming adopting the WHO framework.…”

“…The IGDS9-SF has been shown to present with robust psychometric properties according to a recent review study of 21 studies across 15 languages that employed the IGSD9-SF (Poon et al, 2021 ). Spanish IGDS9-SF has been found to present with excellent psychometric properties under the CTT (Beranuy et al, 2020 ; Sánchez-Iglesias et al, 2020 ) and IRT frameworks (Maldonado-Murciano et al, 2020 ). In the present study, the IGDS9-SF exhibited high levels of internal consistency ( α = 0.90 and ω = 0.85).…”

“…Since the earlier inclusion of IGD by the APA in the DSM-5 as a tentative mental health disorder, several psychometric tests have been developed to assess disordered gaming based on the APA framework (Pontes et al, 2021 ), among which a few have been translated and psychometrically validated to Spanish-speaking samples. Specifically, the Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGD-20 Test; Pontes & Griffiths, 2014 ), the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale-Short Form (IGDS9-SF; Pontes & Griffiths, 2015 ), and the Ten-Item Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGDT-10; Király et al, 2017 ) have all been tested in Spanish-speaking populations, with studies generally reporting promising psychometric properties (Beranuy et al, 2020 ; Fuster et al, 2016 ; Király et al, 2019 ; Maldonado-Murciano et al, 2020 ; Sánchez-Iglesias et al, 2020 ). Although these standardized psychological measures are useful and psychometrically sound for assessing disordered gaming (Poon et al, 2021 ), they have been developed to assess IGD under the APA framework.…”

Psychometric Properties of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short-Form (IGDS9-SF): Systematic Review

“…In the current literature, the IGDS9-SF has been translated into 17 languages: Chinese, with three sublanguages of traditional Chinese in Hong Kong [22][23][24], traditional Chinese in Taiwan [22][23][24], and simplified Chinese in mainland China [25]; Albanian [26]; Italian [26]; English [26]; European and South American Portuguese [27,28]; Slovenian [29]; Persian [30]; Polish [31]; Spanish [32][33][34]; Turkish [35]; German [36]; Czech [37]; Malay [38]; and Korean [39]. As a screening tool, the IGDS9-SF can help clinicians in assessing IGD severity and the detrimental health impacts on the individual's life with reasonable accuracy in a time-efficient way.…”