The Betting and Gaming Council has stated its members are concerned about the UK Gambling Commission’s Gambling Survey for Great Britain as they believe its findings may be “unreliable” and overstating gambling participation and gambling-related harm.
The commission published its first annual GSGB report earlier this week as the gambling regulator seeks to “establish a new baseline for understanding gambling behaviour in Britain”.
However, due to the changes to data collection to a push-to-web methodology, the UKGC has emphasised that the GSGB report estimates “are not directly comparable with results from prior gambling or health surveys and such comparisons should not be used to assess trends over time”.
The GSGB featured responses from 9,804 people in the 2023 annual report, but this figure will increase to around 20,000 by next year.
BGC members raise concerns
In a statement, BGC members have raised concerns about the estimates reported in the GSGB, noting that the estimates may be “unreliable” as there is a “significant risk GSGB overstates gambling participation and gambling related harm”.
A spokesperson for the BGC said in a statement: “The methodology used in this survey is different to those previously conducted into betting and gaming.
“As a result, the Gambling Commission has been clear, GSGB should not be used to make direct comparisons with results from prior surveys, as a measure of addiction, or to gross up problem gambling prevalence to the whole population.
“Our members are concerned these findings may be unreliable because there is a significant risk GSGB overstates gambling participation and gambling related harm.
“Surveys using predominantly online self-completion consistently produce higher estimates of gambling participation and associated harms, compared to established alternative survey methods.”
The statement continued: “The BGC and our members are committed to raising standards and we welcome any robust study that accurately gauges betting and gaming participation and problem gambling prevalence.
“This commitment is backed by record funding, with BGC members voluntarily donating over £170m over the past four years to independent Research, Prevention and Treatment services to tackle problem gambling and gambling related harm.
“Each month around 22.5 million people in Britain enjoy a bet and the overwhelming majority do so safely and responsibly. The most recent NHS Health Survey for England estimated that 0.4 per cent of the adult population are problem gamblers.”
Independent GSGB review
The UKGC commissioned Professor Patrick Sturgis of the London School of Economics in November last year to conduct an independent review of the push-to-web approach for GSGB.
Publishing his review this year in February, Sturgis defined the GSGB developments as “exemplary in all respects”, and that the move to push-to-web will bring several “important benefits”.
However, he also provided seven recommendations for how the UKGC can address unresolved issues following his review of the GSGB methodology. This included:
- Research to better understand the relationship between survey topic and the propensity of gamblers to respond to survey invitations.
- Additional research to understand the role of socially desirable responding as the driver of the difference in gambling estimates between in-person and self-completion surveys.
- Randomised experiment to evaluate the effect of the updated list of gambling activities on estimates of gambling prevalence and harm.
- Assess the extent of potential bias in the subset of questions administered to online respondents only.
- Continue to monitor best practice developments in the area of within household selection of adults in push-to-web surveys.
- Research on the prevalence of gambling and gambling harm in groups that are excluded from the GSGB because they are not included in the sampling frame.
- Seek opportunities to benchmark the estimates from the GSGB against a contemporaneous face-to-face interview survey in the future.
Following the publication of the first annual GSGB report, Sturgis stated: “The new design of the Gambling Survey for Great Britain will significantly enhance the evidence base on patterns and trends in gambling behaviour.
“With an annual sample size of 20,000 individual interviews across the nations and regions of Great Britain, the survey will provide researchers and policy makers with fine-grained and timely data across a broad range of key indicators.
“Using a push-to-web mixed mode design and random probability sampling from the Postcode Address File, the survey implements state-of-the-art methodology to a very high standard.”