Report
Understanding and measuring consumer trust in the gambling industry - Full technical report
The understanding and measuring consumer trust in the gambling industry full technical report from The Gambling Commission.
Developing a composite index score
From the 8 statements detailed previously, 5 were chosen to form a composite trust index score. They were:
- Gambling companies are held accountable by a regulator if their conduct falls short of standards
- Effective measures are in place to protect young, and other vulnerable, people when gambling
- Activities, offers and odds provided by gambling companies are clear, easy to understand and not misleading
- Gambling games and machines are fair and free of errors
- Gambling companies are free from corruption.
While 8 statements were put forward for the Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) in total, these 5 were chosen as the core statements for the composite trust index calculation owing to their broad thematic spread, and their high levels of importance in the Maximum Difference (MaxDiff) exercise, both of which meant they were thought to be an accurate way of developing an index to track ‘trust’ over time. The additional three statements were included for broader Gambling Commission understanding, allowing them to maintain awareness of emerging themes concerning trust in the industry.
A composite index was chosen as it allows the Commission to aggregate multiple responses into a single metric to give them a holistic view of trust in the industry. This is particularly pertinent given the broad nature of the drivers of trust, as demonstrated earlier in this report and in the accompanying full report.
As these statements will be posed to respondents on an agreement scale in the GSGB, the index works by assigning a ‘score’ to each statement based on the response given. These scores are shown in the table.
Table 1: Statement response scores
| Response | Score |
|---|---|
| Agree strongly | 100 |
| Agree slightly | 80 |
| Neither agree nor disagree | 60 |
| Disagree slightly | 40 |
| Disagree strongly | 20 |
| Don't know | 0 |
A composite index score is then attributed at the respondent level, based on an average of their statement-by-statement scores. So, for example, if a respondent selected ‘Agree strongly’ for three statements, and ‘Disagree strongly’ for the other 2, the calculation would look as follows:
If a respondent selects ‘Don’t know’, then that statement does not receive a score for their respondent-level index, and the index is calculated by taking an average of the remaining statements. An example of this is available, using the same responses as before, except for ‘Don’t know’ instead of the final ‘Strongly disagree’.
If ‘Don’t know’ is the response for 3 or more statements per respondent, then that respondent does not contribute to the index score at the overall dataset-level.
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Last updated: 23 July 2026
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