Gambling participation and the prevalence of problem gambling survey

The Gambling Commission has undertaken a project to improve the way it collects data on adult gambling participation and the prevalence of problem gambling. The project started in 2021 with a pilot survey and was completed in early summer 2023. This report summarises the findings from the experimental stage of the project.

The purpose of the experimental statistics phase was to build on the pilot and conduct further testing and refinement, to ensure the survey design and questionnaire content is robust for official statistics continuous data collection.

The experimental statistics phase involved three steps:

• Step 1 - experiments on participant selection and gambling-related harm questions.
• Step 2 - testing different approaches to asking about gambling participation.
• Step 3 – the final test of the agreed approach and content taking on board recommendations from step 1 and step 2 has been completed.

The survey moved, in summer 2023, to continuous official statistics data collection.