Australia's Gambling Industries - Productivity Commission

For the National Gambling Survey, the modified version of the SOGS was used not
only because the shorter time frame is most appropriate for assessing current
prevalence (which is of greatest policy relevance) but also because the way in which
the SOGS was asked of respondents was more comprehensive than is normally the
case. That is, the SOGS questions were asked:
• in the conventional way — mainly requiring a yes or no response; and
• in terms of a frequency scale — if a respondent answered yes to a question, they
were then asked ‘is that rarely, sometimes, often or always?’; or if a respondent
answered no, they were then asked ‘do you mean rarely or not at all?’
The approach of asking the SOGS questions to allow responses in terms of a
frequency scale has been used by Professor Mark Dickerson in virtually all previous
Australian gambling prevalence surveys. The Commission’s approach of following
both the conventional and the Dickerson approaches therefore allows comparisons
of results with previous Australian and most overseas surveys. However, to have
asked the SOGS in the SOGS-R version as well as in terms of a frequency scale
would have imposed too big a burden on respondents and for that reason the
SOGS-M was used.
The National Gambling Survey did not administer the SOGS to all respondents —
indeed there are good reasons why gambling surveys do not ask the problem
gambling screen of all participants:
• questions about what people do when they gamble are clearly of no relevance to
non gamblers. In the National Gambling Survey, respondents were classified as a
non gambler only after they had answered ‘no’ to thirteen separate questions
about whether they had participated in any of twelve specified gambling
activities and an ‘any other’ gambling category. Hence, this detail of questioning
should reliably identify a genuine non gambler.
• a problem gambling screen is of little or no relevance to infrequent gamblers
because their gambling is very unlikely to be associated with problematic
behaviour; but
• it is most appropriate to administer a problem gambling screen to those
respondents whose gambling has a greater likelihood of giving rise to problems.
Indeed, as the NORC study (Gerstein et al. 1999) noted:
We chose to use these “filter” questions in the national survey after our pretesting
indicated that nongamblers and very infrequent gamblers grew impatient with repeated
questions about gambling-related problems (p. 19).
For these reasons, the problem gambling diagnostic instrument was administered
only to that subset of gamblers considered most likely to experience problems
F.14 GAMBLING