Reaching out to big losers: Exploring intervention effects using individualized follow-up.

Abstract

Objective: Previous research suggests that a brief duty-of-care telephone call to high expenditure customers was associated with lower gambling over the subsequent year. The current aim was to assess effects on individual trajectories rather than overall group effects reported previously. The objective was to identify different patterns of individual change over the follow-up year and explore differential responses of subgroups of individuals. Method: A matched pair design contrasting the outcome for telephone intervention with a nointervention control condition. Five hundred and ninety-six statistical pairs randomly drawn from the top 0.5% of customers based upon annual expenditure at Norsk Tipping, Norway. Primary outcome measure was gambling theoretical loss (TL), derived from the Norsk Tipping gambling data warehouse. Player trajectories across time were identified using growth mixture modeling to assess differential intervention effects on homogenous subgroups of individuals. Results: Relatively low, medium, and high TL subgroups were identified. The telephone intervention was associated with greater reductions than the control condition for all three subgroups but showed the strongest effect for the subgroup with the highest TL. The intervention was most effective for casino and sport gamblers, male, young, and middle-aged. Conclusions: A brief duty of care telephone contact with high expenditure customers showed sustained effects over 12 months, in particular for individuals showing the highest level of TL. Examining trajectories using advanced statistical models identified customer characteristics most strongly associated with reduced TL. These findings can guide prevention strategies with evidence-based knowledge about differential effects. Public Health Significance StatementA brief contact intervention with high expenditure customers showed sustained positive effects, in particular for individuals showing the highest level of expenditure. Findings about differential effects for individuals with specific profiles can guide evidence-based knowledge prevention strategies to provide duty of care for gambling customers.

Beyond ‘single customer view’: Player tracking's potential role in understanding and reducing gambling‐related harm

“…Sweden [79] and the UK [55]. These Norwegian studies have found evidence in support of safer gambling features within on-line operators' platforms [76,77] as well as evidence for an individualized telephone call intervention for higher-spending gamblers [47], which has revealed persistent effects at a year's follow-up [80]. As gambling supply is restricted to so few operators in Norway, it is also fairly straightforward for researchers to derive relatively universal measures of gambling behaviour to study responses to these interventions.…”

“…Such conflicts between researchers and commercial gambling operators may explain why field studies involving collaborations with the Norwegian state monopolies have asked some of the more impactful research questions to date [47,76,77], with some notable field studies also having recently been conducted in Australia [78], Sweden [79] and the UK [55]. These Norwegian studies have found evidence in support of safer gambling features within on‐line operators’ platforms [76,77] as well as evidence for an individualized telephone call intervention for higher‐spending gamblers [47], which has revealed persistent effects at a year's follow‐up [80]. As gambling supply is restricted to so few operators in Norway, it is also fairly straightforward for researchers to derive relatively universal measures of gambling behaviour to study responses to these interventions.…”