£250,000 Grant Awarded for Female Problem Gambling Research
Charity GambleAware has awarded a £250,000 grant to a research team to help build evidence of the real-life experience of women with gambling-related harm.
The grant is set to fund a team that will be led by the director at IFF Social Research Agency, Kelsey Beninger.
The New Research Team
Beninger will now collaborate with the University of Bristol’s Maria Fannin, professor of human geography, and Sharon Collard, professor of personal finance at the same institution. They will work together with GamCare’s head of programmes, Dominique Webb, and the same organisation’s Marina Smith, who is currently women’s programme manager.
The new research team will follow mixed methods, using a multi-sector and multidisciplinary approach during what is set to be an 18-month long programme. The programme will include in-depth interviews, roundtables, and community committees with women who have what is known in the industry as ‘lived experience’ of gambling-related harm.
The Study’s Objectives
Some of the main objectives of the team’s research will be to explore the lives and real experiences of women and their engagement with gambling experiences, many of them negative, gambling harm, and the treatment offered and sought by related support services.
The researchers will also be seeking to establish and study the known drivers of gambling harm within women in Great Britain. They plan to explore interventions and policies and study the services needed to reduce or prevent gambling-related harm for women.
GambleAware has commissioned this research as part of its five-year organisational strategy. GambleAware sees women’s experiences of gambling harm as not having been researched thoroughly enough that it is often shown as homogenous. It seems that women’s reported gambling problems are often seen as different from men’s gambling experiences.
Putting on Record Women’s Real Gambling Experiences
The grant has been awarded to the research team by GambleAware for it to be able to drill down into the real experiences of women from different communities, checking on their ongoing support needs.
The research will be an important stepping stone towards making certain that GambleAware, and other similar organisations, are helping to provide the proper range of support and treatment needed for problem female gamblers.
For its part, GambleAware has shown itself to be fully committed to delivering a proper public health approach to gambling-related harm, along with understanding the wider causes that drive it. Such causes are often listed as gender, race, ethnicity, health, and inequalities.
While hugely important for women specifically, this research could prove to be greatly beneficial to the industry as a whole.
Many times before, we’ve written about how “problem gamblers” are often lumped into one category, something that is not good for men either and certainly not good for those who bet, play, and gamble with restraint and even skill.
For example, horse racing, sports betting, and poker players are often simply referred to as ‘gamblers’, usually derogatory.
Their privacy is being threatened due to calls for online gambling companies to see financial details to assess their ability to gamble safely; however, no credit card bans or such invasive financial checks were brought in regarding the sale of lottery tickets or bingo.
The percentage of lottery and bingo players, the results of such games players have no control over, is larger in the female community. So the results of this research will be very interesting to read concerning the percentage of problem gamblers coming from within those pastimes and among the female population.
