Gender differences in gambling preferences and problem gambling: a network-level analysis

Abstract

Most gambling studies have a gender-blind research approach, although a large body of scientific evidence suggests that gambling in females is on the rise and that males and females have different gambling behaviors and experience specific gambling-related harm. The present study is the first to address these gender differences using a network analysis, an innovative approach considering disorders/concepts as dynamic systems of interacting symptoms/items. Data on gambling activities, problem gambling (using the Problem Gambling Severity Index), and health issues (substance use and mental health) were collected in a representative sample of French adult gamblers (n=8,805). We capitalized on the network analysis directly to compare associations of specific gambling activities with gambling disorder symptoms separately for both genders. The network analysis revealed that problem gambling was strongly associated with gambling machines among females, whereas it was related to sports betting, poker, and casino games among males. The networks including health issues showed that substance use is related to specific gambling activities. These findings confirm the links between various gender-specific gambling patterns and problem gambling and suggest a need to consider these gender differences to improve prevention efforts. More broadly, the present study further supports the importance of gender differences for gambling research and policy.

Preferences on Online Gambling Activities among Adolescents: A Review

“…In contrast, Gonzalez-Roz and colleagues [30] found that none of the online gamblers in their sample were problem gamblers, and also 10.2% of mixed-mode gamblers were problem gamblers. Online gamblers' engagement in more types of gambling compared with non-online gamblers was consistently reported across the selected studies [41,42,62]. Finally, regarding the prevalence of online gambling over the years, Hollen and colleagues [52] found that online betting increased in both males and females as they aged, and Rosow and colleagues [53] reported a decrease on weekly gambling prevalence over the years.…”

“…Again, the type of gambling activity may be influencing these inconsistent results as some authors have reported differences between different types of gamble and limited addictive power [65]. For both genders, lottery, scratch games, sports betting, and skill games seem to be less related to problem gambling [62] and, therefore, less associated to a stable activity over time.…”

“…According to the majority of the results, the rates of problematic gambling, gambling severity, and higher risk for problem gambling were higher among online gamblers than offline gamblers [41,42,46,50,62]. In contrast, Gonzalez-Roz and colleagues [30] found that none of the online gamblers in their sample were problem gamblers, and also 10.2% of mixed-mode gamblers were problem gamblers.…”

“…Particularly, twelve articles detected gambling through sports bets [29,30,49,50,38,39,[41][42][43][44]46,48], and card games [29,30,51,53,38,41,42,44,46,[48][49][50], being the most frequent activities. Seven articles found online gambling machines [30,41,42,44,48,49,62] and casino games [30,38,45,47,49,50,62], and six studies detected lottery games [30,41,44,49,50,62].…”

Further Exploration of the Psychometric Properties of GamTest: A Rasch Analysis

“…Previous studies have shown that men and women have different gambling preferences, which can also be supported by the findings in this study. Women gravitate towards chance-based games (e.g., gambling machines), while men prefer skill-based games (e.g., sports betting and horse racing) [ 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ]. The items that differed indicate that women might have a higher degree of social guilt when it comes to gambling.…”