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Sturgis review recommendation 3 update

Impact of new gambling activities list on the Gambling Survey for Great Britain participation and consequences estimates

Published
9 October 2024

Last updated
9 October 2024 - Changes

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  1. Contents
  2. Context

Context

In February 2024, Professor Patrick Sturgis published an independent review (opens in new tab) of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB).

The independent review assessed the GSGB’s methodological approach and made recommendations for improvements to ensure the quality and robustness of the statistics. A key emphasis of the review was the need to examine how methodological differences between previous Health Surveys1 and the GSGB may have impacted estimates of gambling participation and harm. In particular, Sturgis recommended examining the effect of transitioning from in-person interviews to self-completion surveys, and establishing the potential impact of changes to the list of gambling activities provided to participants.

Recommendation 3 was as follows:

“The stage 3 experimental survey found significantly higher Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) scores than the 2022 pilot. This might have been a result of the use of an updated list of gambling activities on the 2023 survey but it might equally have been due to an increase in gambling harm in the population. In order to assess the impact of the updated gambling activity list, an experimental design is necessary.

Recommendation 3: the Gambling Commission should undertake a randomised experiment to evaluate the effect of the updated list of gambling activities on estimates of gambling prevalence and harm.”

References

1 There are three separate health surveys: the Health Survey for England (HSE)(PDF)(opens in new tab), the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS)(PDF)(opens in new tab), and the National Survey for Wales (NSF)(PDF)(opens in new tab) which has a health component to it. All contain the same gambling participation activity list questions. For brevity we will be using the term “health surveys” going forward.

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Experimental design and hypothesis
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