This study explored how the use of smartphones can influence sports betting by young adults, compared to using computers and land-based betting facilities. Interviews with 33 Australians aged 18–29 years, who bet regularly on sports, esports, and/or fantasy sports, were analysed using adaptive grounded theory. Seven major themes related to platform functionality, sourcing betting information, physical accessibility, financial accessibility, social influences, privacy, and marketing. The grounded theory model depicts how features of smartphones, online gambling, and betting apps combine in smartphone betting to provide instantaneous access to betting, anywhere and at any time, to facilitate harmful betting behaviours. These behaviours included increased betting participation, frequency and expenditure, placing a wider variety of bets, impulsive and spontaneous betting, placing riskier bets with longer odds, chasing losses, and acting on social encouragement to bet. These findings can inform harm minimisation measures, regulation, and policy.

Jurisdictions around the world have a self-declared mandate to reduce gambling-related harm. However, historically, this concept has suffered from poor conceptualisation and operationalisation. However, recent years have seen swift advances in measuring gambling harm, based on the principle of it being a quantifiable decrement to the health and wellbeing of the gambler and those connected to them. This review takes stock of the background and recent developments in harm assessment and summarises recent research that has validated and applied the Short Gambling Harms Screen and related instruments. We recommend that future work builds upon the considerable psychometric evidence accumulated for the feasibility of direct elicitation of harmful consequences. We also advocate for grounding harms measures with respect to scalar changes to public health utility metrics. Such an approach will avoid misleading pseudo-clinical categorisations, provide accurate population-level summaries of where the burden of harm is carried, and serve to integrate gambling research with the broader field of public health.

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Background and aimsIt is well understood that engagement with some forms of gambling, like EGMs, is riskier than other forms. However, while reports of associations are common, few studies have attempted to evaluate and compare the relative risk of all available forms, and none have estimated the relative contribution of each form to the total burden of gambling problems (GP) in a population.MethodsUsing an aggregated dataset of national and state-based prevalence studies in Australia (N = 71,103), we estimated prevalence and unique effects of frequency of engagement on each form on GP. Two alternative numerical methods were then applied to infer the relative contribution of each form to the total amount of GP.ResultsEGMs are responsible for 51%–57% of gambling problems in Australia, and 90% of gambling problems are attributable to EGMs, casino, race, and sports betting. Casino table games and EGMs are equally risky at the individual level, but the former contribute far less to problems due to low participation. Bingo and lottery play show no statistically detectable risk for GP.Discussion and conclusionThe results illustrate which forms present the greatest population burden and illuminate the reasons why. EGMs have an outsized impact. EGM uniquely combines high risk conditional on play, with a high participation rate and a high frequency of play among participants. This is in contrast to risky but less commonly played casino games, and prevalent but non-risky forms like lotteries. We conclude that EGM regulation should be a primary focus of policy action in Australia. More innovative policy ideas relating to EGMs should be tested due to the disproportionate impact of this product type.

Problem gambling can have negative impacts on both harmed gamblers, and those people close to them (concerned significant others; CSOs). Experiencing these gambling-related harms can have a significant impact on a person's wellbeing and quality of life. Recently, the focus of research on people with gambling problems has expanded from exploring gambling-related harms and specific psychological outcomes, to include global evaluations of health and wellbeing. However, it is also important to understand the degree to which these impacts extend to CSOs. This narrative literature review presents what is known about the impact of gambling-related harms on CSOs' wellbeing and identifies areas of future enquiry. The review identified both knowledge and methodological gaps, including that relatively little is known about impacts to CSOs' subjective wellbeing. What is known, is confounded by different methods of identifying CSOs across studies, and the use of predominantly small, nonrepresentative, and treatment-related samples. Addressing these gaps will lead to a greater understanding of the impact of problem gambling on the community.