Chasing Gamblers: Development and validation of an early-signaling tool for at-risk online gamblers

The number of online gamblers, particularly among young people is growing and a large number of those are at risk of experiencing serious harm from gambling (for example financial or social harm).

Objective

Typically, there are several years between the beginning of gambling and the development of a gambling addiction. This represents a window of opportunity to identify such at-risk gamblers and stop the development in its tracks before substantial harm is done. For this to succeed, valid assessment tools are necessary to reliably identify such at-risk gamblers. However, such tools are lacking in the Netherlands.

Approach

The collaborative group of researchers, clinical experts, and individuals with gambling experience and/or problems will conduct several studies to develop, validate, evaluate, disseminate such an assessment tool for use in the Netherlands.

Research partners

The project is a collaboration between the Behavioural Science Institute (BSI) at Radboud University, Radboud UMC (RUMC), the Nijmegen Institute for Scientist-practitioners in Addiction (NISPA), and Donders Institute. The project team is supplemented with psychologists and researchers from 4 large addiction care facilities; Tactus, IrisZorg, VNN, and Novadic-Kentron. This ensures the recruitment of a diverse group of people with lived experience who can help validate the assessment tool that the researchers will develop.

(Expected) results

By creating this assessment tool, we can protect a larger number of people from gambling harm.