Unpacking the Myth in the Associations Between Self-control and Gaming Disorder in Children and Adolescents: A Comparison Between Traditional and Random Intercept Cross-lagged Panel Model Analyses

Internet gaming is becoming increasingly popular; however, children and adolescents are highly vulnerable to gaming disorder due to the underdevelopment of cognitive control. Longitudinal research providing empirical evidence confirming the stability and direction of the association between self-control and gaming disorder is scarce. This study is aimed at clarifying whether prospective relationships exist between self-control and gaming disorder in children and adolescents or whether they are associated due to common causes. We examined the temporal dynamics of the associations between self-control and gaming disorder symptom severity using a traditional cross-lagged panel model (CLPM; aggregating between- and within-person variance) and a random intercept CLPM (RI-CLPM; disaggregating between- and within-person effects) with three-annual wave data from a large cohort of primary and secondary students (N = 1359, mean age 12.67 (SD 1.40), 834 (61.7%) girls). The traditional CLPM indicated a unidirectional negative relationship from self-control to later gaming disorder (B with 95% confidence interval [CI] = − 0.12 [− 0.19, − 0.040]), whereas the RI-CLPM analysis revealed no prospective relationship between self-control and gaming disorder (95% CIs of Bs all contain 0), indicating that self-control was neither the cause nor the result of gaming disorder in children and adolescents. Our study revealed that the nature of the relationship between self-control and gaming disorder tends to be correlational but not causal. The potential common underlying factors for future research are discussed.