Tag: user_id 13800

Newswise — For many years, addiction research has focused on chemical dependencies like drugs and alcohol. However, new phenomena such as video game and social media addictions are not as extensively studied. 

Dr. Puneet Manchanda from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business dives into the world of modern addiction. He talks about his research on how these technologies impact us and what steps can help prevent addiction.

The latest episode of the Curious by Nature podcast, titled “How Addictive Are Companies Making Video Games” featuring Dr. Puneet Manchanda, is now available on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

Curious by Nature, presented by Newswise, is a podcast for curious people. In each episode, listeners can travel briefly into the fascinating world that comes with years of dedication to one field of study. Be inspired by the many amazing things that are going on right now, some of which may have a major effect on our lives. Enjoy this concentrated knowledge from experts. We hope you can take inspiration from glimpses of innovation, dedication, and discovery.

Follow us!

Spotify Podcast: https://spoti.fi/3YC1c1q

Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/4copuPI

Newswise — If you’re worried that your kids are wasting too much of their summer playing video games, there could be an unexpected payoff in the future.

A new study by the Rutgers Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) reveals that gaming, modding, and related hobbies can form a career pathway into the high-demand IT field, especially for adolescents and teens with supportive parents.

“Students don’t realize it at first, but playing video games and having related hobbies is often really helpful when choosing a career and even while job hunting,” said Rutgers EERC Research Analyst Eliza Peterson, the lead author of the study. “For example, if they’re hosting a Minecraft server for their friends, they could parlay those skills and lessons into a Server Administration major, and later, maybe a career in that area of IT.”

As part of a larger study supported by the National Science Foundation, Rutgers researchers interviewed 43 students and alumni of the Ivy Tech Community College School of Information Technology in Indiana. The interviews, conducted over three years, revealed a common trajectory.

Most participants became interested in technology at a young age, often while bonding with their parents, and more than half of them (26 of 43) eventually developed a hobby such as gaming, modifying games (modding), coding, programming, or building computers.

As teens, they did not expect that their passion for playing Minecraft or Fortnite could eventually lead to a job. But they eventually had a revelation – what the researchers call the “hobby-to-career reckoning” – and decided to study IT in their community college.

“I realized I have a lot of fun doing this,” said one gamer who decided to change majors. “I made the switch because I realized that I felt like everyone was pushing me to [study] business. But what I really enjoyed was learning programming.”

One alumnus, now a software engineer at J.P. Morgan, described how his coding hobby prepared him for the complexities of handling IT at a large financial institution: “That’s kind of where I shine, because the sort of sloppy hobbyist coder in me has been doing that all my life.”

A recent Pew Research Center study finds that 85% of American teens play video games, and 41% play them at least once a day. Studies have shown that gaming can improve cognitive function and memory, while helping gamers to develop important soft skills.

The Rutgers study adds to this growing body of work by highlighting a pathway from the thumb-cramping World of Warcraft into the lucrative world of IT work.

There are nearly 4.5 million computer and information technology professionals in the U.S., earning a median annual wage of $104,420, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s more than double the median annual wage for all occupations ($48,060).

More than 377,000 computer and IT job openings are expected each year, and overall employment is projected to grow “much faster” than the average for other occupations by 2032, including 25% growth for software developers and 32% for information security analysts.

Many of those future IT professionals could be playing Roblox or Brawl Stars today. But the Rutgers study notes there are several obstacles on the journey from hobby to career.

An estimated 42 million Americans lack broadband internet access, disproportionately affecting low-income families. This “digital divide” may prevent some students from developing an interest in the IT field. In addition, parental skepticism can deter some students from pursuing their passion.

While many of the participants felt supported in their decision to study IT, others were met with resistance at home. One first-generation student told the researchers that his family “didn’t get it” and urged him to enter a different field, but he pushed forward and earned an associate degree in software development.

“If you’re a parent or educator, I would encourage you to reframe the way you think about gaming,” Peterson said. “The gamers in your life could be gaining useful – and potentially lucrative – skills through these hobbies. In fact, you may even want to foster these hobbies further, and help them to see, ‘Hey, I could use this later on in life, in school or at work.’”

So the next time your teen turns on the PS5, perhaps think of it as employment training.

About the Study

Not “Just a Hobby”: The Influence of Early Interest and Hobbies on Community College IT Student Decision-Making by Eliza Peterson, Michelle Van Noy, Sam Scovill, and Renee Edwards appears in the Journal of Advanced Technical Education.

About Us

The Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) is the world’s leading source of expertise on managing and representing workers, designing effective organizations, and building strong employment relationships. 

SMLR’s Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) strives to improve education and training to ensure students and workers are prepared to be successful in today’s workforce. 

Newswise — A new scientific review of 148 studies enrolling over 4.3 million adult chronic pain patients treated with prescription opioid painkillers has found that nearly one in ten patients experiences opioid dependence or opioid use disorder and nearly one in three shows symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder.  This University of Bristol-led study, published in Addiction, provides a more accurate — and more concerning — rate of opioid misuse than has previously been calculated. 

Companies like Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma have claimed that fewer than 1% of opioid prescriptions result in problems for patients.  This new review, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR),  makes clear that such claims greatly understate the risk of opioid misuse and addiction.  

The researchers divided the 148 studies into four general categories, depending on how the studies defined problematic opioid use: 

1. dependence and opioid use disorder: 43 studies that identified problematic opioid use through diagnostic codes (formal diagnoses using precise definitions);
2. signs and symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder: 44 studies that looked for behaviours indicating dependence and opioid use disorder, such as craving, tolerance, or withdrawal, without use of specific diagnostic codes; 
3. aberrant behaviour: 76 studies that looked for inappropriate or concerning behaviour, such as seeking early refills, repeated dose escalations, or frequently lost prescriptions; and
4. at risk of dependence and opioid use disorder: 8 studies that looked for characteristics that might increase the risk of developing opioid dependence or opioid use disorder in the future; however, the characteristics do not fall within previous categories of aberrant behaviour or dependence and opioid use disorder.

Some studies reported multiple results within the same participants using different measurement criteria, so the sum of the number of studies in each category equals more than 148.  The prevalence (frequency) of problematic opioid use for each category was: 

1. Dependence and opioid use disorder: 3%, or nearly 1 in 10 patients.
2. Signs and symptoms of dependence and opioid use disorder: 6%, nearly 1 in 3 patients.
3. Aberrant behaviour: 22%, more than 1 in 5 patients.
4. At risk of dependence and opioid use disorder: 4%, nearly 1 in 8 patients.

Lead author Kyla Thomas, Professor of Public Health Medicine at the University of Bristol, explained: “Clinicians and policy makers need a more accurate estimate of the prevalence of problematic opioid use in pain patients so that they can gauge the true extent of the problem, change prescribing guidance if necessary, and develop and implement effective interventions to manage the problem.  Knowing the size of the problem is a necessary step to managing it.”

The studies in this review were predominantly from North American research and high-income countries. One hundred and six of the 148 studies were conducted between 2010 and 2021; the oldest study was from 1985.  Study size ranged from 15 to 2,304,181 patients. Due to the high heterogeneity of the studies, these findings should be interpreted with caution. 

Paper

‘Prevalence of problematic pharmaceutical opioid use in patients with chronic non-cancer pain: A systematic review and meta-analysis’ by Kyla H. Thomas et al. in Addiction

Audio

Newswise — Since 2009, U.S. high school seniors have reported steep declines in medical use, misuse and availability of the three most commonly prescribed and misused controlled substances for teens, a new University of Michigan study found. 

Researchers compared use trends, sources and perceived availability of opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines from 2009 to 2022. The research letter detailing the findings is scheduled to appear July 24 in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.  

“To put these findings in context, the reduction over the past decade was like going from 1 in every 9 high school students using prescription drugs nonmedically down to 1 in every 40 high school students,” said Sean Esteban McCabe, U-M professor of nursing and director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health.  

“While this decrease is encouraging, we need to be vigilant because any amount of nonmedical use poses risks, especially with the danger posed by counterfeit pills.”

Other findings from 2009 through 2022: 

• Lifetime medical use decreased from 24% to 16%. 
• Past-year misuse declined from 11% to 2%.
• The percentage of adolescents who reported being given prescription medications by friends or buying them from friends, both fell by more than half. 
• In 2009, adolescents who reported misusing prescription medications said the most common source was friends. Now, it is one’s own prescription (37%).
• Among adolescents who reported misuse, those with multiple sources for obtaining prescription medications dropped from 56% to 29%.
• Perceived difficulty of obtaining prescription medications for misuse declined across the three drug classes.
• The percentage of adolescents who reported that they thought it would be impossible to get prescription drugs for misuse increased from 36% to 49%. 

School closures during COVID accounted for the largest changes because students had limited contact with each other, and opportunities to sell or give away prescription drugs to friends declined, McCabe said.

Study co-author Philip Veliz, research associate professor of nursing, said the declines may be partially due to changes in prescribing practices, especially for opioids. The study did not examine specific trends based on drug class. 

“Prescribing practices have changed dramatically because we had an opioid epidemic, which turned into a heroin epidemic, and we’re still reeling from that, especially with fentanyl,” Veliz said. “A lot of this also has to do with parents having better knowledge and oversight of these medications.”

The steep decline in teens who misused prescription medications in the past year, from 11% to 2%, surprised researchers.

“That’s a massive decline. It used to be 1 in 9 kids, now it’s an incredibly rare event at this point,” Veliz said. “The second surprise was that … nearly half of kids say it’s probably impossible to get these drugs if they want to use them nonmedically right now. That’s a big chunk of the adolescent population, and this is just off the table.” 

Another surprise is that the landscape has not returned to what it looked like before COVID, McCabe said. 

“Adolescents have found it more difficult to obtain prescription stimulants for nonmedical use in recent years, which is a positive sign,” he said. “There needs to be more attention on stimulant use and diversion, and our team is currently working on such studies to help inform clinical guidelines for ADHD and stimulant use disorder.”

This study was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and used data from 12th grade students collected in 2009 through 2022 from the Monitoring the Future study, an annual survey at University of Michigan that tracks student substance use and other related trends.

Co-authors include: Emily Pasman, Tim Wilens, Ty Schepis, Vita McCabe and Jason Ford.

Study: Adolescent use, diversion sources, and perceived difficulty of obtaining prescription medications (DOI: 10.1001/jama.2024.12030)