The people who work in casinos and other gaming venues are an important and under-researched group in the pathological gambling literature. Gaming employees constitute a unique group not only because they interact daily with customers in casinos, but because they are slightly more vulnerable to gambling disorders than the general population (Shaffer, Vander Bilt, & Hall, 1999). Because of these and other factors, most states and casino operators in the U.S. require gaming employees to go through training on the specifics of disordered gambling and responsible gaming. However, there has been very little published research done on the effectiveness of employee training programs used by casinos. In fact, the first study of an employee training program by a U.S. research team was recently published in the Journal of Gambling Studies (Laplante, Gray, Labrie, Kleschinsky, & Shaffer, 2011).
