Gambling Commission’s new Gambling Survey for Great Britain deemed “exemplary in all respects”

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Professor Patrick Sturgis has backed the Gambling Commission’s (GC) new Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB) project while making several recommendations to address key unresolved issues.

The GSGB is being developed to produce “relevant” and “robust” official statistics to assist with stronger regulation moving forward.

The new approach will mark a switch from the current model of a quarterly telephone interviews to a ‘push-to-web’ survey focusing solely on gambling.

The regulator sought an independent review to determine the likely impact of the survey and whether it was the best method to review gambling prevalence, as well as ways to improve the study before the first set of stats are released at the end of this month.

In his feedback, Sturgis highlighted that the survey would allow for a “considerably larger sample size” in the range of 20,000 responses annually, compared to the previous 4,000 from the quarterly telephone surveys.

Sturgis looked at the GC’s pilot study of the GSGB, which ran in January and February 2022, and saw 1,078 responses.

The professor noted that the response rate in the pilot survey was 21%, which was comparable to other ‘push-to-web’ surveys conducted in the UK at that time, with the findings showing 63% of the public had gambled in the previous 12 months compared to 54% in the 2018 Health Survey for England.

Sturgis said: “My assessment of the development of the Gambling Survey of Great Britain (GSGB) is that it has been exemplary in all respects. Given the very high cost and declining response rates of in-person interview surveys, it was not feasible to continue with this sort of design into the future.

“This was true even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but its effects on the general viability of in-home interviewing have made mode-choice even more stark.

“For different though equally compelling reasons, telephone interviewing is no longer a realistic alternative for obtaining cost-effective and accurate population estimates in Great Britain.

“The move to self-completion was therefore, in my judgement, the correct decision.  In making this transition the Gambling Commission has consulted widely with a broad range of stakeholders and followed industry standards of best practice in developing a mixed-mode push-to-web design that will yield high quality estimates of gambling prevalence in Great Britain on a quarterly and annual basis in the years ahead.”

While endorsing the move to develop the GSGB, Sturgis made seven recommendations to the GC on how it should “address the key remaining unresolved issues”, admitting that while the first four were higher priorities, the remaining three were to some extent out of the regulator’s control.

These include conducting research to understand the relationship between survey topics and the “propensity of gamblers to respond to survey invitations”, taking the necessary steps to understand any bias in the questions put to online respondents, and seeking opportunities to benchmark the estimates from the GSGB against face-to-face interview surveys in the future.

He added: “There are some issues that will require further consideration following the launch of the new design, to ensure public and stakeholder confidence in the quality and robustness of the statistics.

“Until there is a better understanding of the errors affecting the new survey’s estimates of the prevalence of gambling and gambling harm, policy-makers must treat them with due caution, being mindful to the fact there is a non-negligible risk that they substantially over-state the true level of gambling and gambling harm in the population.”

Tim Miller, GC executive director, said the regulator welcomed the recommendations and reiterated that better data would lead to better regulation.

Miller commented: “We are delighted that Professor Sturgis’s report concludes that the Gambling Commission have followed best practice in developing the GSGB survey.

“We are clear that better evidence, driven by better data will lead to better regulation, which in turn will lead to better outcomes.

“We welcome the recommendations in the report to continue to understand the impact of the changes made to both the survey design and the methodology as we move forward with the launch.

“We recognise that all methodologies need to continue to evolve and improve over time and this independent report helps to highlight some initial areas of focus once our new approach has gone live.”

EGR recently spoke to Miller in a two-part Q&A in which he addressed affordability checks and international cross-collaboration.