The UK Gambling Commission has continued its mission to “establish a new baseline for understanding gambling behaviour in Britain” by publishing the second part of its Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB).
It marks a transformation in the way data is collected and presented by the body as it adopts new methodologies.
A sample size of 5191 adults aged 18+ was analysed by the National Centre of Social Research (NatCen) for the period of January-to-April for the wave 1 research.
While the Gambling Commission was keen to underline that the latest results aren’t comparable to previous results due to an evolution of methodology, it revealed that the main reason respondents gambled was ‘for the chance to win big money’ and ‘because it’s fun’.
Furthermore, the UKGC detailed that participation in gambling currently stood at 48%, falling to 27% if removing those who have only played lottery products in the past four weeks.
In terms of demographics, participation is at its peak for males aged 45 to 54 years old. Once again, however, this shifts with the removal of lottery draw only players leading to those aged 35 to 44 being the most prevalent players.
At the GambleAware Conference, Andrew Rhodes gave insight into the new process and how his team came to the conclusion they did in terms of the development of the new format, revealing it has been “painstaking” and will focus on “modernised questions with increased frequency, and flexibility”.
He added that it will also “benefit from an increase in scale – with around 20,000 respondents each year when it is fully up and running. It will be the largest survey of its kind in the world”.
This scale was evident in the latest methodology report as the UKGC intensified the range of questions being asked in order to develop more stringent data.
As the transformation continues for the UKGC, it also added two questions to gain a deeper insight into the relationship between the UK public and betting.
These included the number of gambling accounts registered per person and the number of accounts they engage with monthly.
The new methodology and the scaling of the development of a more in-depth report will be key when it comes to PGSI. The new survey asks:
In the last 12 months, how often…
- …have you bet more than you could really afford to lose?
- …have you needed to gamble with larger amounts of money to get the same feeling of excitement?
- …have you gone back to try to win back the money you’d lost?
- …have you borrowed money or sold anything to get money to gamble?
- …have you felt that you might have a problem with gambling?
- …have you felt that gambling has caused you any health problems, including stress or anxiety?
- …have people criticised your betting, or told you that you have a gambling problem, whether or not you thought it is true?
- …have you felt your gambling has caused financial problems for you or your household?
- …have you felt guilty about the way you gamble or what happens when you gamble?
