Measuring gambling-related harms among children and young people: A framework for action

As part of the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms a new framework to understand gambling harms experienced by children and young people has been published by the Gambling Commission today. 

This report, which has been developed by Ipsos MORI in collaboration with the Gambling Commission, Advisory Board for Safer Gambling and GambleAware, presents a framework to better understand the ways that harms from gambling can impact upon the health, relationships and finances of young people. It builds on earlier work to develop a framework for gambling harms among adults.

The framework has been designed to cover the broad spectrum of harms that can impact young people and the next phase of work will test some survey questions for measuring gambling harms.  The questions have been included on Ipsos MORI’s Young Person’s Omnibus survey and the data will be analysed to explore which questions are most and least effective for further monitoring. 

The launch of the new framework comes a week after the Commission launched the new National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms.

Helen Rhodes, the Gambling Commission’s Programme Director for Safer Gambling said: “Gaining a better understanding of the impact of gambling on children and young people is a key priority for the Commission.

“Childhood and adolescence is a key stage of development and any harms experienced at this stage in life can be detrimental to the future development, confidence and potential of young people.

“This newly released framework will provide critical insight into the range of harms that young people in Britain can experience and will help greatly in concentrating the National Strategy’s prevention and education initiatives where they will have the most impact.

“This will take time and the framework will evolve as we move into the next phase of this work. We encourage our partners in delivering the National Strategy, including public health officials and academics to feed back to us as we move into the next phase of work.”

Lead researcher at Ipsos MORI, Margaret Blake said: “This framework has been developed with professionals, young people and experts in gambling in a series of workshops, interviews and focus groups.  The initial questions cover just some of the harms in the framework and are intended to explore the entire range of harms that can be experienced from gambling, even where it would not be classified as problem gambling.  This work is just a starting point and we anticipate that the framework and measures will develop in the future.”

Director of Research and Evaluation at GambleAware, Clare Wyllie said: “This initial framework is designed to help guide and focus research and action to reduce gambling harms in children and young people. We encourage other researchers to build further evidence to develop the framework, so together we can move faster and go further to reduce gambling harms.”

The new strategy has a dedicated website and is available to view through www.reducinggamblingharms.org

Read the report here and the Gambling Commission's announcement here.