The fix is in

I wrote last year about some ‘experimental statistics’ from the Gambling Commission that suggested that there are far more problem gamblers in Britain than we thought there were. They appeared to show that 2.5 per cent of the UK population have a gambling problem whereas every official survey in the last 25 years has found the rate to be around 0.5 per cent. The experimental statistics are now official statistics and anti-gambling campaigners are claiming that they prove that “the harms caused by gambling have been massively underestimated”.

But do they? To save money, the government is switching from face-to-face surveys and telephone surveys to online surveys despite it being well established that “online surveys over-estimate gambling harm”. Until recently, people’s gambling habits were tracked as part of the Health Survey for England. People were randomly selected to take part in the survey and those who accepted were interviewed in their home. Since people feel it is their civic duty to take part in a national health survey, its participation rate was a respectable 50 per cent.

The new Gambling Survey for Great Britain is very different. Letters were randomly sent to 37,554 addresses asking the residents if they would like to take part in an online survey about gambling. If they didn’t respond, they were sent another letter telling them that they could do the survey by post if they preferred. Despite the inducement of a £10 fee, most people did not respond. Only 19 per cent of those who were sent the letter ended up taking part in the survey, mostly online.

When four out of five people refuse to take part in your survey, you no longer have a random sample of the population. Unlike the Health Survey for England, the Gambling Survey for Great Britain is explicitly badged as being about gambling. Who is this most likely to appeal to? People who gamble a lot. And people who gamble a lot are more likely to problem gamblers than people who don’t.

 

Can the Gambling Commission really convince the public that rates of problem gambling are eight times higher than they are? Probably.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.