Australia's Gambling Industries - Productivity Commission

The main reason for identifying these three categories of respondents was because
not all questions in the main interview were relevant for all three groups. In
particular, because previous gambling surveys have found that problem gamblers
are generally regular (weekly) rather than infrequent gamblers, the problem
gambling screening instrument used (the South Oaks Gambling Screen, SOGS) was
only administered to the ‘regular’ group.
The approach of administering the problem gambling screen to the subset of
gamblers most likely to experience problematic behaviour is commonplace in the
gambling survey literature. The filtering approaches used to determine that subset
have typically been based on:
• frequency of play — with ‘regular’ or ‘frequent’ gamblers generally defined as
those who gamble at least once per week (or even once per month, as in Focal
Research 1998);
• expenditure on gambling; or
• losses experienced — for example, in the recent US NORC study (Gerstein et al.
1999) the focus was on those respondents who acknowledged experiencing
significant losses (defined as $100 or more in a single day of gambling).
The National Gambling Survey used a combination of the first two points —
frequency of play (filter 2) and annual gross expenditure on gambling (filter 3,
described below) — to define the subset of gamblers most likely to experience
problems from their gambling.
Filter 1 — to classify respondents as gamblers or non gamblers
Respondents were asked if they had participated in any gambling activity in the last
12 months, from the list of twelve presented in box F.1:
• if a respondent answered no to all forms of gambling, or yes only to raffles, they
were classified as a non gambler; or
• if a respondent answered yes to at least one gambling activity (excluding raffles),
they were classified as a gambler and proceeded to filter 2.
Filter 2 — to classify gamblers as regular or non-regular
Respondents who had undertaken one or more gambling activities in the last 12
months were asked how often they had participated in each of those activities (in
terms of how many times per week, per month or per year). This filter allowed a
respondent to be classified as a regular or a non-regular gambler.
F.6 GAMBLING