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.

---

Published
19 April 2023

Last updated
18 April 2023 - Changes

Document actions
Print or save

Contents

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

---

• Executive summary
• - Experimentation work
• - Response
• - Assessment of experiment results
• - Recommendations
• Introduction
• - Background
• - Aims and overview
• Methodology and response
• - Survey design
• - Questionnaire content and design
• - Response to the survey
• Testing an alternative approach to the selection of participants within households
• - Introduction
• - Completion rates in responding households
• - Adherence to participant-selection instructions
• - Duplicate cases
• - Household clustering
• - Prevalence of gambling behaviours
• - Conclusion
• Measuring gambling-related harms
• - Introduction
• - Testing different ways of asking about gambling harms
• - Results
• - Conclusion
• Testing different approaches to asking questions about gambling participation
• - Introduction
• - Comparison of gambling participation across the three approaches
• - Potential primacy effect with the long-list approach
• - Additional considerations for the postal questionnaire
• - Other considerations
• - Conclusion

Experimentation work

The Gambling Commission is undertaking a project to improve the way it collects data on adult gambling participation and the prevalence of problem gambling. The project started in 2021 with a pilot survey and this report summarises the findings from the experimental stage of the project.

The purpose of the experimental statistics phase was to build on the pilot and conduct further testing and refinement, to ensure the survey design and questionnaire content is robust for official statistics continuous data collection. The experimental statistics phase involved three steps:

1. Step 1 - experiments on participant selection and gambling-related harm questions.
2. Step 2 - testing different approaches to asking about gambling participation.
3. Step 3 - final test of agreed approach and content taking on board recommendations from step 1 and step 2 (not yet started).

Subject to the success of the experimental phase, the survey will move, in summer 2023, to continuous official statistics data collection.

This report outlines the experimental stage methodology and analysis for steps 1 and 2. The report also makes recommendations for the next phases.

Next section
Response

---

Last updated: 18 April 2023

Show updates to this content

No changes to show.