British Gambling Commission reports on experimental gambling harm survey

The British regulator has provided an update on the second stage of its new survey on the prevalence of gambling harms.

UK.- The British Gambling Commission is trialling a new way to gain statistics on problem gambling prevalence to replace its longstanding telephone surveys. This week it reported back on the second stage of an experimental trial of the new survey, led by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).

The second stage of the project saw NatCen make more tests to refine the survey’s methodology and content. Two experiments tested the content and sampling. The first tested the survey’s household selection and the presentation of harms statements while the second was a split sample experiment designed to find the “optimum approach” for the number of adults per household invited to take part.

In the first experiment, NatCen changed the wording on invitation letters to clarify that it was interested in responses from both gamblers and non-gamblers and tested results when inviting two instead of four adults per household to take part.

It also built on Gambling Commission’s work to develop a way of understanding the incidence and nature of gambling harms. NatCen tested whether a yes/no response worked better than a four-point scale. It made a number of recommendations for the final methodology, recommending that two, rather than four, adults per household be invited to take part and that the four-point scale be maintained.

In the second experiment, NatCen tested its presentation of gambling activities with an updated list and different ways of presenting the list: a long list, chunked list and hierarchical list. It also tested the use of a quick response QR code to bypass the need to manually enter data.

NatCen recommended the long-list approach and QR codes as an alternative method of survey access. The new gambling harm survey project was approved after a pilot last year A third test stage has started and will run until July in order to make the survey “robust and fit for official statistics”.

Latest problem gambling survey

Reporting the results of its most recent traditional telephone survey in March, the Gambling Commission reported that problem gambling in Britain remained at a record low of 0.2 per cent for 2022 as a whole. The results of its latest quarterly telephone survey suggest a drop in the problem gambling rate from 0.3 per cent in the previous year.

The number of gamblers at low risk remained at 1.7 per cent for the quarter ended December 31. There was, however, a “significant rise” in the number at moderate risk, from 0.8 per cent to 1.3 per cent.