Young people’s experiences of gambling – qualitative research findings
Commission Research and Impact Manager Lauren Cole discusses the findings from our recently published Young People and Gambling Qualitative Research.
Posted 3 March 2025 by Lauren Cole
Last week we published the Young People and Gambling Qualitative Research report. We commissioned 2CV to conduct qualitative research with young people, aged 11 to 17 years old, to build on and contextualise the findings from the annual Young People and Gambling Survey. This has allowed us to strengthen the evidence base feeding into Evidence theme 1 - Early gambling experiences and gateway products of our Evidence Gaps and Priorities programme of work.
This is the first time we have spoken to young people in depth about their experiences and perceptions of gambling and the findings have really highlighted just how complex a topic this is for young people. They are regularly exposed to gambling without fully grasping its proximity to their daily lives or its potential impact over time and often link gambling to how much money is spent, rather than a game of chance for money. For example, the low amounts of money spent and the presence of parental consent and adult supervision, distinguished arcade gaming machines from what they perceived to be gambling.
As a parent myself to two young boys, it was really interesting to see in this report that early gambling experiences, including losing money, can provide positive learning experiences for young people and can be a critical first step in the journey of understanding how to gamble safely. Almost like watching my sons learning to walk and ride a bike. They have both had to experience falls and bumps along the way to find their balance and learn what will stop them falling next time. Experiences in arcades, for example, have the potential to equip young people with financial skills later in life.
However, while these experiences take place in controlled, family-supervised settings, the online world now allows for many unsupervised experiences. 2CV heard from boys that said they have lost ‘millions’ in casinos in Grand Theft Auto (which we also think could explain why every year a small percentage of young people say they have gambled inside a casino on the Young People and Gambling survey). This highlights the blurred boundaries for young people, who are legally restricted from physical gambling spaces yet can easily access similar activities online without their parents being aware.
Being a mum of boys, I also found it interesting that the 2024 Young People and gambling Survey findings reported the rate of young people scoring 4 or more on the juvenile DSM-IV screen, and therefore representing a young person experiencing problem gambling, was three times higher among boys (1.7 percent vs 0.6 percent of girls). 2CV also found notable differences between boys and girls in this research. Many of the boys in this research had a particular interest in gaming, exposing them to gambling-like features including loot boxes. They also had a keen interest in football and therefore a heightened exposure to gambling advertisements and sponsorships through attending football matches and checking results on apps. We heard of examples of where online betting on football is being enabled by parents with some dads giving their teenage boys access to their accounts.
Yet despite this relatively high exposure to gambling in their daily lives, the report also highlights that very few young people understand the impact of problem gambling to an individual (such as anxiety, depression, stress) and those affected by someone’s gambling.
I hope that when my boys are teenagers that they will have had conversations not only with me but with their teachers and peers about the impact gambling can have, and that they will be able to make informed choices when inevitably gaming and deciding whether to engage with loot boxes and perhaps just as importantly, I hope that I as the parent can keep up with the technology and implications of what they are playing.