Gender and Gambling Behaviors: a Comprehensive Analysis of (Dis)Similarities
- PDF / 331,104 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 71 Downloads / 199 Views
Gender and Gambling Behaviors: a Comprehensive Analysis of (Dis)Similarities Danielle Venne 1 & Alissa Mazar 2
& Rachel Volberg
2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Gambling is a gendered activity. Yet, the majority of research focuses on males and treatment seeking/clinical populations—a population that is fundamentally distinct from and ungeneralizable to non-treatment seekers. The objective of this article is to tease out the characteristics that discriminate the subtypes of gambling behavior by gender based on a representative sample of a population. In 2013–2014, 9523 Massachusetts adults completed a survey examining their past year gambling behavior based on the Problem and Pathological Gambling Measure (PPGM). Unlike male at-risk gamblers, female at-risk gamblers are likely to play bingo and have anxiety and/or depression. Unlike female at-risk gamblers, male at-risk gamblers gamble to “feel good” about themselves. Unlike males, female problem/pathological gamblers are more likely to have a problem with drugs or alcohol in the past 12 months. Unlike females, male problem/pathological gamblers are more likely to have unhappier childhoods, gamble online, and identify as Hispanic. Demographic, health-related, and gambling-related discriminators are largely the same for female and male gambling subtype behaviors. There are, however, a few defining characteristics that differentiate females and males in terms of the likelihood of experiencing problematic gambling behavior. Keywords Gambling . Gender . Population survey . Problem gambling . At-risk gambling States are expanding the gambling options available to their residents. With the expansion of gambling, what makes an individual more likely to experience problem gambling is of interest from a public health perspective (Cunningham-Williams et al. 1998; Volberg 1994). Most problem gamblers likely progressed from being non-, recreational, and at-risk gamblers. Despite this, the literature addressing the subtypes of gambling behavior is limited and focuses
* Alissa Mazar [email protected]
1
Center on Medical Product Access, Safety & Stewardship, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
2
School of Public Health and Health Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 715 North Pleasant Street, 416 Arnold House, Amherst, MA 01003-9304, USA
International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
on special populations (Raisamo et al. 2013; Räsänen et al. 2016). There is even less literature to date that comprehensively examines how subtypes of gambling behavior differ by gender. To our knowledge, this study is the first to comprehensively assess gambling subtype behaviors by gender using a representative sample of a population. In Massachusetts, casinos were sanctioned in 2011. In anticipation of the development of casinos, a baseline measure of the gambling behavior of Massachusetts residents was collected in 2013–2014. The present analysis uses this baseline measure—the Baseline General Population Survey of Ma
Data Loading...
