Gambling before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among online casino gamblers: an empirical study using behavioral tracking data

Auer, M and Griffiths, MD ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8880-6524, 2022. Gambling before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among online casino gamblers: an empirical study using behavioral tracking data. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, 20 (3), pp. 1722-1732. ISSN 1557-1874

Preview

Text 1406177_a2174_Griffiths.pdf - Published version Download (698kB) | Preview

Abstract

Gambling, like many other leisure activities, has been greatly affected by the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The present study investigated the behavior of a sample of online casino gamblers before and after the COVID-19 pandemic was announced in March 2020. The authors were given access to behavioral tracking data of a representative sample of 133,286 online casino gamblers by a large European online gambling operator with several online casino Swedish licenses. Online casino gambling activity utilizing daily cross-sectional data was examined over a 5-month period from January 1 to May 31 (2020). Results indicated that the (i) number of active online casino gamblers significantly increased over time, (ii) mean average amount of money bet by online casino gamblers daily significantly decreased over time, (iii) mean average daily bet by online casino gamblers at both the 90th and 99th percentiles significantly decreased over time, and (iv) mean average daily bet by online casino gamblers at the 10th and 25th percentiles significantly increased over time. The analysis also indicated that the number of high-risk players significantly decreased during the 5-month study period. While many different groups have claimed that gambling and problem gambling would increase during the pandemic due to more time being spent at home, evidence from the present study suggests that this is not the case because gambling intensity decreased, at least among Swedish gamblers.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
Creators:	Auer, M. and Griffiths, M.D.
Publisher:	Springer
Date:	June 2022
Volume:	20
Number:	3
ISSN:	1557-1874
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s11469-020-00462-2 DOI 1406177 Other
Rights:	© the author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Jeremy Silvester
Date Added:	04 Feb 2021 16:04
Last Modified:	20 Jun 2022 13:10
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/42189

Actions (login required)

Edit View

Statistics

Views

Downloads