Report
Lived experiences of affected others: Qualitative research
Lived experiences of affected others: Qualitative research
Affected others who gamble
The Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB)(2024) found that 9 percent of adults are identified as affected others. Of these, 63 percent had gambled themselves in the past 12 months and over a tenth had only participated in a lottery. Given that the majority of affected others gamble themselves, understanding their relationship with gambling (and how they distinguished it from that of the person gambling) was an area of particular interest for this research. Of the 25 participants, 11 reported gambling in the last 12 months.
For most affected others who gambled in this research, their relationship with gambling felt categorically different from that of the person gambling. Most described their own participation as low-stakes, social, and bounded by self-set financial limits and specific occasions. This encapsulated activities like occasionally purchasing lottery tickets, a trip to the bingo, or making sports bets with friends. Often this kind of gambling would initially involve the person gambling too, but the latter’s behaviours would tend to outpace and escalate independently5.
Affected others who gambled tended not to see themselves as people with a gambling habit in any meaningful sense and drew a firm line between recreational participation and what they were witnessing in the person close to them.
"I did use online gambling a fair bit when my best friend started getting into it because we were both having little wins. It was a fun thing to do on payday, we’d play the bingo, but I’ve never really had a ‘relationship’ with gambling, I don’t have an addictive personality. I used to love going to bingo halls and having a day out with mates, but I’ve never bet on any sports in the pub, I would never be the sort of person who gambles, it’s more like a recreational thing."
- Female gambler, 38, friend of person gambling
This distinction that participants frequently made was not simply a factual description of their behaviour, but a way of making sense of the difference between their relationship with gambling and that of the person gambling, and of resisting any implication that their own participation made the situation more ambiguous or less serious.
Among affected others who gambled but kept their own behaviour clearly separate from the person gambling, several described actively putting friction in place to manage their own relationship with gambling. This included setting spending limits, choosing only to gamble in-person rather than online, or consciously stepping back from certain activities. This appeared to represent an awareness of risk, which had in many cases been shaped by proximity to the person gambling’s past behaviours and experiences.
This awareness also shaped how some affected others thought about the person gambling’s activities in different contexts. One participant described joining her partner on a cruise, where he gambled in the onboard casino. Although he had previously struggled with gambling, she felt more comfortable with him doing so in an in-person, contained environment with her present.
"We went on a cruise in August, and there's a casino on the cruise ... I let him go on some slots because I was with him... If I'd said no, I felt like he would have gone. It's worse if I say no because someone's going to want to do something if you say no. I think the main issue was always that it was on his phone and it was convenience, whereas I didn't see it as bad going in because he was with me."
- Female gambler, 27, partner of person gambling
However, for a smaller number of participants, the relationship with gambling was less clearly separate. These were cases where gambling had been a shared activity between the affected other and the person gambling, something done together, at least initially, before escalating in ways that the affected other had not anticipated and did not recognise as harmful until the damage was done.
For Josh, gambling started as something he and his partner would do together at home as a shared Friday-night ritual using bingo and casino-style apps. It was fun and gave them an opportunity to bond. There was a gradual shift in his partner’s behaviour; he began gambling more frequently and in secret, withdrawing from the shared activity while Josh still viewed it as something positive.
When he became aware of the scale of the problem, Josh was left feeling a complicated mix of guilt and loss – grief for the way things had been in the past, alongside a new uncertainty about whether he had contributed to the problem by reinforcing gambling as a regular and fun activity in the first place.
- Male gambler, 39, partner of person gambling
This kind of entanglement (where the affected other and person gambling took part in gambling activities together before the behaviour escalated) carries particular implications for how affected others make sense of their situation. Guilt derived from shared participation is distinct from the guilt of someone who was never involved, and it shapes both the affected other's willingness to seek help, and how they describe the situation to others. It also adds complexity to how these cases are captured in survey data, where the source of a reported consequence may be genuinely difficult to attribute to one person's gambling rather than another's.
References
5 It is worth noting that all participants who reported gambling themselves scored between 0 and 4 on the PGSI; the experiences of affected others with higher PGSI scores may differ and are identified as a priority area for future research.
Last updated: 25 June 2026
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