Report
Lived experiences of affected others: Qualitative research
Lived experiences of affected others: Qualitative research
Executive summary
Gambling harm can be wider than it first appears. When someone’s gambling becomes harmful, the consequences are not always theirs alone. It can ripple outward into relationships, households, and communities, absorbed by the people closest to them. These people are known as affected others.
The Gambling Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) tells us that 9 percent of adults in Great Britain are identified as affected others, and that more than a quarter of those have experienced at least one severe consequence as a result. Notably, 63 percent of those affected others reported gambling themselves in the last 12 months, a finding that shaped the research questions and sample for this study. These numbers speak to the need to better understand the affected other experience – what it means for day-to-day life, how it develops over time, how the gambling environment shapes those experiences, how relationship dynamics influence the impacts felt, and why so few of those affected ever seek help.
The Commission appointed Humankind Research to conduct a qualitative study with affected others from across Great Britain, to contextualise and build on GSGB findings and contribute to the Commission’s roadmap priority of understanding the impact of gambling on people who gamble and affected others. Understanding the scale and nature of harm is central to the Commission’s role as the evidence-led regulator responsible for monitoring gambling participation and prevalence across Great Britain – it informs how the Commission interprets GSGB data, identifies evidence gaps, and fulfils its licensing objective to protect vulnerable people from harm through regulation. This work helps fill a gap in its knowledge around affected others and also provides important insight for those working within the prevention, education and treatment sectors.
Humankind Research conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 25 affected others from across Great Britain between March and April 2026. Participants spanned a range of relationship types, consequence severity levels, and backgrounds, and were recruited with the involvement of the Gambling Commission’s Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP). The research was designed to sit alongside and extend the GSGB (2024) data, providing texture and lived experience that cannot be captured within a survey.
Key findings
Harm experienced by the affected other is rarely confined to a single domain – health, relationship, and financial consequences compound and reinforce each other, making single-domain responses insufficient.
Awareness of harm frequently lags behind the person gambling’s behaviour; by the time affected others recognise what’s happening, harm has already accumulated across multiple areas of their life.
The invisibility of mobile and app-based gambling removes the natural cues that once made a problem identifiable and generates sustained hypervigilance as a result.
Relationship type fundamentally shapes the experience of harm – partners often carry the most sustained harms, but parents, adult children, siblings, friends, and colleagues each describe distinct and specific forms of harm.
Where gambling was initially a shared activity between the affected other and the person gambling, harm becomes entangled with guilt and difficulty attributing consequences – a group not well understood in current data.
Safer gambling tools were encountered almost exclusively at crisis point by the affected other, and all required the person gambling to initiate and maintain them.
Fewer than 1 in 5 affected others seek support (GSGB, 2024); many do not recognise their own experience as harm, and those without a personal relationship to gambling have few natural entry points into services.
Chronic harm (the persistent consequences of lives adjusted around someone else’s gambling) is among the least visible in existing evidence and can continue for years without formal recognition.
As with all qualitative research, the findings presented here are indicative rather than statistically representative of all affected others across Great Britain. They are best read alongside the GSGB data, which provides the quantitative picture.
Implications
This research contributes to the Commission’s Evidence Gaps and Priorities across Evidence Roadmaps Themes 3, 4, 5 and 6, and points to specific opportunities to strengthen the evidence base on affected others. Many of the findings and recommendations in this report do not fall solely within the Commission’s regulatory remit, and are directed at the wider gambling support and treatment landscape, for other organisations and bodies to take forward. A companion report, to be published in the coming months, explores these implications in more depth for organisations working directly with affected others.
Previous sectionContents page Next section
Lived experiences of affected others - Introduction and background
Last updated: 25 June 2026
Show updates to this content
No changes to show.