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.

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Published
19 April 2023

Last updated
18 April 2023 - Changes

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Contents

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

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• 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

Completion rates in responding households

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

The two experimental conditions had different types of participant burden. In C1 (up to two adults) households, the person opening the initial invitation letter was asked to complete a within-household selection and invite the selected (up to two) adults to take part. In C2 (up to four adults) households, they were also potentially asked to distribute the survey details to more (up to four) adults in the household.

The previous Sampling section of this report provides full detail on the response rates achieved in step 1, overall and between the two experimental conditions. As was shown, there was no significant difference between the two experimental conditions in terms of the household-level response rate (18 percent of assumed eligible addresses for C1 (up to two adults) and 17 percent of assumed eligible addresses for C2 (up to four adults)). This was not unexpected given that whilst the types of participant burden may have differed, it is not clear that one condition should be more burdensome than the other.

For both experimental conditions, the majority of responding households had a single participant: 53 percent of C1 (up to two adults) and 57 percent of C2 (up to four adults) households. The larger percentage of single-participant households for C2 (up to four adults) could indicate that the instructions are counterproductive and are failing to persuade more people within the household to take part (Table A.14 Completions per responding household, by experimental condition).

A further indication that increasing the number of adults who may take part in the survey does not necessarily mean those adults will take part is shown in Table A.15 (Responding adults within productive households, by household size and experimental condition). This table shows that as the household size increased, response to the survey did not equally increase. This was most notable for C2 (up to four adults) households where 0 percent of four eligible adult households completed four questionnaires.

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Adherence to participant-selection instructions

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Last updated: 18 April 2023

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