Perpetrators in League of Legends: Scale Development and Validation of Toxic Behavior

Abstract

Toxic behavior (TB) – a form of releasing frustration and anger in a detrimental way – is a common phenomenon in online games. Despite its importance, a validated questionnaire measuring TB is yet missing. In this paper, we apply a comprehensive procedure for scale development by using two difference sources of items. In the first one, the item pool is adapted from an existing scale. In the second one, the act frequency approach is applied to generate a pool of items. We evaluated both scales based on survey data from 380 online gamers. Both instruments are juxtaposed based on their psychometric properties. The results indicate that the adapted scale performs better in the context of our study than the scale generated from the act frequency approach and is, thus, the preferable choice. With a validated measurement scale in place, we discuss how future research can benefit from the TB scale proposed here.