The United Kingdom Gambling Commission intends to update its gambling harm survey questions with a new set of queries related to the nature and severity of harm resulting from someone’s gambling or someone else’s habits.
Among the new questions to be included in the next survey scheduled for January 2022 are questions about suicide, the UKGC said.
New Questions Pending Improvements
After testing the questions on a quarterly basis on the Commission’s tracker survey, the regulator said they were refined and reviewed by the NatCen Questionnaire Development and Testing Hub before the pilot starts in January 2022.
According to the UKGC, the external review and analysis of the pilot data suggested that although the questions were “clear and unambiguous”, further improvements may be needed.
In the next survey, UKGC will present a broader range of questions, including questions about harm from other people's gambling and suicide.
The external review proposed ensuring a broader range of harm issues within the questions and changing the ordering of harms questions to present less severe harms first.
Also, the UKGC was advised to change the scaled response options to enable more equally spaced responses. In other words, the regulator should alter the lowest level of response to a stronger term to ensure that people experiencing harm were indeed experiencing harm rather than the potential for harm.
The Commission was told to revise questions related to “harms from others” as the current form of questions appeared to under-report the number of people they know are gambling so as not to underestimate harm from others.
Finally, the Commission was recommended to proceed with data collection on suicide ideation and attempted suicide.
