“Taking a Survey of Gambling Attitudes and Behaviors from Paper to Practice”

by Jim Wuelfing, Prevention and Recovery Support Services Director
The Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling

This summer, I was at the annual conference of the National Council on Problem Gambling.  Members of the Mass. Council staff presented numerous time and we attended many sessions as well. 

I’m sure many of you have had the experience of going to a really nice session but didn’t get enough practical information to put the experience to much good use once you got back to the office.  One presentation, “Taking a Survey of Gambling Attitudes and Behaviors from Paper to Practice” by Mark Vander Linden of the Iowa Department of Health was entertaining, interesting, insightful and practical.

Mark’s presentation was about an attitude and experience survey administered in Iowa in 2011.  The primary purpose of the survey was to collect data from adult Iowans about types and frequency of gambling activities, prevalence of problem gambling and awareness and opinions of publically-funded gambling treatment services. 1700 Iowans participated in the survey.

To take a step back, one of the sessions I presented at the conference was in developing prevention programs.  I advocated the use of SAMHSA’s strategic planning framework where one of the first steps is to obtain useful data.  We certainly follow that framework when planning prevention activities here at the Council, but we often finding ourselves wishing for more data, especially more local (state specific data).  With the use of a process like the one in Iowa, we might find ourselves doing less wishing and more analyzing of practical local data.

To look at a couple of examples, the Iowa data showed that a large majority of residents (81%) never or seldom gamble and less that 1% gamble very often.  Mr. Vander Linden made the point that such information would be extremely valuable in social norms education.  Those that do gamble very often would see that they do not gamble in a way that was the norm.  One would also need to be sure not to alienate a large percentage of the population by always putting forward a problem gambling message.  One might be better served by congratulating folks who gamble without negative consequence and give risk reduction messages to help them stay that way.

Another piece of the Iowa data that I found interesting with potential practical use was the fact that 10% of those surveyed reported that an important reason they gamble is to win money to pay bills or use gambling as a distraction from everyday problems.  While 10% may not seem like a high number, it may be when you consider that these reasons to gamble are both significant risk factors for developing a more serious gambling problem.  In our prevention work, we seek to help gamblers who are not experiencing any negative consequences from their gambling to continue to gamble that way as well as helping gamblers who are experiencing some negative consequence to reverse that trend or not to progress further into negative consequences.  This kind of data would help in selecting more effective strategies and messages.

Of course, this is not local data.  But the session did encourage the Council staff to continue to seek additional state specific data.  Be looking for a survey coming your way!