18 September 2024
Bilbao Campus
On 18 September, the University of Deusto hosted the presentation of the study ‘Early detection, with a gender perspective, of participants with risky or more serious gambling behaviour’, developed by UNAD, the Addiction Care Network, with the technical assistance of the Deusto Institute of Drug Addiction, thanks to funding from the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumption and Agenda 2030 and the collaboration of the Madrid Salud Institute of Addictions and the Alacrán 1997 Association.
This work analyses the factors that contribute to the onset, maintenance and development of a gambling disorder in young people, taking into account the reality and motivations of both boys and girls. To carry it out, a qualitative methodology has been used and testimonies from young people and from the professional teams working with this population have been taken into account.
The aim is to be able to carry out early detection, to design preventive actions and policies that respond to the reality of young people and to favour access to care resources in the event of possible cases of problem gambling. In addition, it underlines the need for these factors to be taken into account when developing public and health policies.
During the presentation of the study entitled ‘Detection of cases of problem gambling in young people: keys, analysis and reflection’, the president of UNAD, Luciano Poyato, recalled that according to data from the Report on behavioural addictions and other addictive disorders, developed by the National Plan on Drugs in 2023, 21.5% of students aged between 14 and 18 have gambled with money online and/or in person in the last 12 months.
For his part, Mikel Arana, Director General of Gambling Regulation of the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumption and Agenda 2030, highlighted initiatives such as UNAD, the first research carried out on the basis of the Gambling Regulation subsidy line, pointing out that the drafting of regulations ‘requires technical tools that allow regulatory decisions to be based’ on solid foundations and data.
He also put the spotlight on the gender perspective insofar as the higher proportion of men who gamble compared to women who do so should not obviate all the gender conditioning factors behind gambling behaviour. According to the statistics handled by the Ordenación del Juego, ‘of the total of 1,637,831 people with active accounts in online gambling portals, 83.38% are men and 16.62% are women’, explained Mikel Arana.
The rector of the University of Deusto, Juan José Etxeberria, closed the inaugural speeches by pointing out that ‘education and research must go hand in hand with social action’, so that, with regard to the topic addressed by the UNAD study, it is ‘crucial’ with such an initiative to ‘identify and address the factors that sometimes lead to problematic behaviour’ in relation to gambling. Full speech
Main conclusions
Patricia Martínez, expert in Gender, Drug Use, Addictions and Violence and author of the study, and Álvaro Moro, director of the Deusto Institute of Drug Addiction, were in charge of presenting the research. They explained that there are individual, socio-relational and social risk factors when it comes to developing risky, problematic or even pathological gambling, and that there are differences between boys and girls. In this regard, they pointed out that boys are more present in gambling games and girls in bingo.
They added that the cognitive biases detected in the discourses of girls and boys deal with very different issues, with the economic aspect of gambling appearing to a greater extent in boys and the greater influence of skill and learning to influence chance in girls. Other individual risk factors are impulsivity, characteristic of young people, very much in line with online gambling due to its easy accessibility and immediacy in terms of results, and the emotions of activation and excitement that gambling provokes in both boys and girls.
With regard to socio-relational risk factors, the researchers pointed out that, for boys and girls, the closest thing is the world of gambling and, specifically, gambling establishments. In fact, they conceive that going to these places at the weekend and in groups is one more option within the entertainment offer. In fact, they feel that participating in gambling, in person and in a group, serves to socialise and to achieve a status or a position valued for winning. Specifically, in the case of boys, reference is also made to the social pressure exerted by the group when it comes to gambling.
Social context
With regard to the social context, the study points to the normalisation of the culture of chance and risk as a context that also surrounds and permeates the behaviour of the young population. Here, all the advertising strategies for gambling have played and continue to play a very important role, which have traditionally associated the act of gambling with emotions, the idea of winning money or the status that some public figures, such as tipsters and youtubers in general, boast and are highly influential on young people.
Moreover, the fact that social networks are also a channel where gambling is promoted makes them more accessible to a digitally native generation, in such a way that even video games with dynamics such as loot boxes also contribute to introducing gambling at an earlier age. All this, according to the researchers, leads to a low perception of risk among young people, although girls show greater empathy and closeness to people who have developed some kind of gambling-related problem.
In any case, risky behaviour is associated by boys with spending and availability of money, while girls attach greater importance to the frequency of gambling or the alterations that gambling ends up causing in the person. What both men and women do agree on is that the social perception of a woman with a gambling problem is worse than that of a man due to the normalisation of problem behaviour in boys and not so much in girls, as well as the generalised conception of women as more cautious.
Getting into the game
When it comes to gambling, the research shows that young people try their luck in a legal way when they come of age in order to make quick money and emulate either the advertising discourse or someone in their close environment who has a positive experience in this respect. Thus, the possible initial winnings reinforce faith in the likelihood of continuing to win so that, when losses appear, the gambling system begins to demand ever greater investments to recover the losses, which ends up generating a habituation that leads, especially among young people, to think more in terms of investment and to explore new gambling spaces as well as consolidating others.
The full study can be consulted here.
