Predicting the Risk of Gambling Activities in Adolescence: A Case Study
Adolescent gambling is internationally considered a serious public health concern, although this phenomenon is less explored than adult gambling. It is also well known that the early onset age of gambling is a risk factor for developing gambling problems
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Abstract Adolescent gambling is internationally considered a serious public health concern, although this phenomenon is less explored than adult gambling. It is also well known that the early onset age of gambling is a risk factor for developing gambling problems in adulthood. This study examined 7818 adolescents enrolled in 16 public high schools in Lombardy, a Northwest Italy region, between March 2017 and April 2018 and it is part of a larger study aimed at investigating dysfunctional behaviours of adolescents, with the purpose of identifying the factors that increase the risk of vulnerability and the protection factors able to reduce the incidence of pathological phenomena. The objective of the present study was to investigate the susceptibility of adolescents in high school to develop gambling problems, explained by some individual and social factors, and by the association with the use of substances, such as alcohol and tobacco and other risk-taking behaviours. Various modelling methods were considered from an imbalanced learning perspective, as the prevalence rate of high school students in the sample with problem gambling is equal to 6.1%.
1 Introduction Gambling behaviour in Lombardy is spreading at a higher rate than before (Cavalera et al. 2018). Besides, over the last few years, an increasing number of adolescents have been engaged in gambling activities. Adolescents may be more sensitive to the problem of gambling than adults (Keen et al. 2017), and a part of the occasional gambling teenagers are at risk of developing a real psychiatric disorder, known as the L. Benedan (B) Bicocca Applied Statistics Center, University of Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. S. Monti Department of Economics, Management and Statistics, University of Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. Mariani and M. Zenga (eds.), Data Science and Social Research II, Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51222-4_5
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Gambling Disorder provided for by the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013). This phenomenon has been recognised as an important public health issue and an emerging field of research (Blinn-Pike et al. 2010), which is associated with delinquent behaviour, depression and suicide attempts (Cook et al. 2015). Health statistics in recent years have shown an increase in the frequency of gambling-related diseases among the younger age groups of the population. Several studies have been carried out in order to understand what factors determine this disorder, and how they affect its development. However, further studies are needed to better understand the role of different variables in influencing the values, beliefs and behaviours associated with this problem. The present study aimed at predicting the gambling problems of adolescents through a Balanced Random Forest (BRF) algorithm to deal with the imbalanced data classification prob
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