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Report

Gambling participation and the prevalence of problem gambling survey: Experimental statistics stage

Gambling Commission report produced by NatCen on the experimental statistics stage of the gambling participation and the prevalence of problem gambling survey.

Other considerations

You can view tables referenced in this section by downloading the file Tables A1 to A48 - Gambling Survey - Experimental statistics stage (XLSX)

Online questionnaire break off rates

Online questionnaire break-off rates (that is participants exiting the questionnaire) during the gambling participation questions were very low: just seven hierarchical-list participants, six long-list approach participants and one chunked-list participant (Data not shown).

Inconsistent responses

A review was carried out into inconsistent responses to the gambling participation questions. Inconsistent responses were defined as instances where a participant did not report gambling on a particular activity in the last 12 months, but then reported gambling on that activity in the last four weeks.

As the hierarchical approach was more complex to navigate on paper, it might have been expected that for this approach there would have greater inconsistency between activities reported at follow-up questions and those reported at the initial participation. This did not appear to be the case: the number of inconsistent responses ranged from one to 10 per questionnaire for this approach compared with one to 11 for the long-list and one to 17 for the chunked-list19.

No discernible pattern in response inconsistencies was found across the three question approaches (Table A.47 Inconsistency in responses: Proportion of participations reporting gambling on each activity in the last four weeks but not in the last 12 months).

Exclusiveness of gambling activities listed

In order to capture the full range of gambling activities, the final item in the participation lists for all three approaches was 'another form of gambling'. Online participants who selected this answer option were asked to record what this other form of gambling was.

The proportion of participants selecting the 'another form of gambling' option was similarly low across the three approaches (between two percent and three percent for gambling in the last 12 months and between one percent and two percent for gambling in the last four weeks, none of these differences were statistically significant), which suggests that the updated gambling participation list successfully captures all types of gambling (Table A.48, Number and proportion of participants selecting the “another form of gambling” answer option).

Around half of 'another form of gambling' responses could be back coded into the pre-existing code frames. This included 16 participants who described their ‘another activity’ as ‘the Grand National’’ or ‘horse racing’, rather using the pre-existing code 'Betting on sports and racing'.

Most of the remaining responses were valid forms of gambling but the participant did not provide enough information for it to be back coded into one of the existing answer options. For example, responses such as 'Football results' or 'Betting' could not be back coded for the long-list and chunked-list approaches as the participant did not state whether this was in-person or online.

References

19 Significance testing was not carried out due to small numbers and the differences in how groups of activities were presented to participants, according to the question approach.

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Additional considerations for the postal questionnaire
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