Paper Title
An Exploration Study of Family Functioning, Parent-Child Relationship, and online Game Addiction Among Malaysian young Adolescents

Abstract
This research aims to understand better the Malaysian young adolescents’ online gaming profiles (i.e., family environment, lifestyles, and gaming habits) and explore parents’ views and challenges in dealing with online gaming in their children’s lives. The research is a cross-sectional quantitative questionnaire survey among 373 youth of varying ethnicity, aged 10-14 years, to characterize Malaysian youth’s gaming profile, lifestyles, gaming usage, and behaviours. The contributors for the quantitative questionnaire survey comprised 199 male and 174 female students from public schools (64.1%), private schools (29.8%), International schools (4.3%), and home-schooled (1.9%). The survey was presented online, via various social media using Qualtrics digital survey platform, and in the more old-fashioned “pencil and paper format. Multi-player (MMORPGs) games were reported as the most common, with relaxing and releasing stress the most common motivations given. Various gadgets are used to play online and offline games, with a high percentage of youths acquiring their first digital “gadgets” at an early age (7-9). Males spent a much higher percentage of time gaming online than females. The results show a correlation between the family quality of life, particularly mother-child relationships, and the level of gaming addiction in adolescents. The study result shows that higher satisfaction in a mother-child relationship is associated with a higher risk of online gaming addiction among young adolescents.The strengths of this research program lie in the importance of its focus on the topical, growing modern digital gaming phenomena and there being little prior work on this in Malaysia. The information from the present study has its potential to contribute useful insights for policy-makers and mental health practitioners around optimizing the benefits of these technologies, plus dealing with the downsides when gaming usage can become problematic and addictive. Keywords - Family functioning, parent-child relationship, online game addiction, Malaysian young adolescent