Gambling Commission to update gambling harm survey questions

The British regulator will expand the range of questions used in its survey.

UK.- The British Gambling Commission has announced that it will update its survey questions on gambling harm following a trial. The new questions will expand the regulator’s quarterly tracker survey to cover a broader range of harms, including non-financial harms and the impact of another person’s gambling.

The trial, which started in January, also tested questions about the severity of harm experienced and about suicide. The questions had been reviewed by the NatCen Questionnaire Development and Testing Hub before testing.

Data from the pilot was then analysed by the University of Glasgow and by two independent experts, Robert Williams and Rachel Volberg, who were asked to provide recommendations on how questions could be improved.

The regulator said some improvements had been suggested, including a suggestion to widen the range of harm issues so the questionnaire would not be so heavily focused on financial harm. It was also suggested that the order of questions be changed to present questions on less severe types of harm first. The scale response options were also tweaked to clarify if respondents were experiencing harm rather than potential harm.

Based on this feedback, the regulator worked with NatCen to update the questions. They also developed an experiment to investigate whether a binary response or scaled option works best to ask about experiences of harm. Questions on suicide have been retained, while the ordering and wording of questions on harm have been updated. These will now be subject to further review with a view to including them in the questionnaire next year.

The Gambling Commission said: “Our aim is for the harms questions to be asked alongside core questions on participation and problem gambling in 2023, and become part of our suite of official statistics.

“We are not aiming to develop a headline score or scale of gambling-related harms or measure the cost of gambling harms to society. The Commission has a role to play in utilising its existing surveys to add to the wider evidence base. 

“However, there is still a need for a range of partners to be involved in the funding and delivery of research to measure and understand gambling harms and the impact that they have on individuals, families, communities and society.”