Peer-Reviewed Study

Study Protocol of the Internet User Cohort for Unbiased Recognition of Gaming Disorder in Early Adolescence (iCURE), Korea, 2015–2019

Oct 2017 🇰🇷 BMJ Open PEER-REVIEWED

This BMJ Open paper lays out the design of iCURE, a multi-year prospective study that enrolled roughly 3,000 Korean adolescents across 21 schools starting in 2015. Psychiatrist Hae Kook Lee of the Catholic University of Korea is among the co-authors of this founding protocol, which describes tracking participants' internet and gaming habits alongside emotional, social, school, and family measures over several years. Rather than a single snapshot, the cohort design lets researchers observe which factors are associated with the emergence, remission, and recurrence of patterns linked to internet gaming disorder in the same young people over time. TechKids Foundation includes this protocol paper as the methodological foundation behind Lee's later iCURE findings on gaming-disorder risk, physical health, sleep, and mood in adolescents, several of which are cited elsewhere in this library.

~3,000 adolescents across 21 Korean schools, 2015–2019

The iCURE protocol describes a planned multi-year cohort of Korean adolescents recruited from 21 schools, tracked for internet gaming disorder incidence, remission, and recurrence over the study period.

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CITATION

Jeong, Hyunsuk, Hyeon Woo Yim, Sun-Jin Jo, Seung-Yup Lee, Eunjin Kim, Hye Jung Son, Hyun-Ho Han, Hae Kook Lee, Yong-Sil Kweon, Soo-Young Bhang, Jung-Seok Choi, Bung-Nyun Kim, Douglas A. Gentile, and Marc N. Potenza. "Study Protocol of the Internet User Cohort for Unbiased Recognition of Gaming Disorder in Early Adolescence (iCURE), Korea, 2015–2019." BMJ Open 7, no. 10 (2017): e018350. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-018350

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