Research
GamCare is committed to bridging the current gap between universities, research organisations, charities and frontline services to make sure that research is practical and applicable.
By building relationships with stakeholders and being aware of current trends in research, we have an impact on the questions that are asked, and the methods used to answer them.
We regularly receive requests to join research projects in different capacities. We assess the projects based on our guiding principles, ethical standards and other methodological criteria outlined in our research framework.
Any research that GamCare is involved in must:
- Help and not hinder everyone who feels its impact.
- Be applied research that creates tools or provides insights that can be used in service design and/or delivery.
- Be shaped by and include the meaningful involvement of people who have been affected by gambling harms.
Next steps for harms measurement
Our previous scoping work, including literature review of academic and grey literature, alongside stakeholder engagement, identified a series of recommendations for future research on the measurement of gambling related harms. It suggested that:
- Measurement of gambling should focus on harms
The field should move away from anachronistic measurement tools that conflate harms and behaviours, often used to produce pseudo-clinical and stigmatising ‘problem gambler’ labels onto individuals. New measurement tools should be used, predicated on modern measurement approaches such as robust frameworks and lived experience input.
- Various harms measurements need to be rationalised in a single ‘harm index’
With various different approaches being used to measure harms (e.g. the SGHS in Australia; the NatCenGH-13 in the Gambling Commission annual survey), the proliferation of harms measurement needs to rationalised by using standard statistical approaches such as IRT. This would enable a standardised ‘harm index’ to be generated from various questionnaire approaches, including those for affected others.
Such an approach would provide backwards compatibility with historic measurement such as the PGSI, where data could still be used to produce scores on the same, common ‘harm index’. This ‘harm index’ could act to replace PGSI scores, and used as a common metric for monitoring harms at the level of individuals through to whole populations.
- Harms measurement should be linked to decrements in quality of life
This will align gambling with other public health economic approaches, enabling cost-effective targeting of interventions for the highest overall impact on quality of life.