college gambling

Although adolescents are particularly prone to environmental influences as they come into young adult age, few studies have looked at the effect that genetics versus environment has on gambling behaviors.  Serena King, PhD, a 2006 New Investigator grantee of the National Center for Responsible Gaming, built upon her prior work looking at personality, gender, and family history in the prediction of college gambling, with this 2017 longitudinal twin study.

What is the aim of this review?

As the NCAA basketball tournament hits its stride, fans around the nation are filling out brackets and possibly placing bets on the game. While gambling can be fun if you’re of legal age, it’s not a risk-free activity. For some college students, gambling for fun can turn into a serious problem and have a negative impact on their lives.

To help address this issue, the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) is proud to announce the launch of its College Gambling Awareness Campaign, bringing new resources to www.CollegeGambling.org. These new and invaluable resources, including the BetOnU College Gambling Survey, a shareable video and an information-packed toolkit, were developed to further help college health professionals and administrators educate students about gambling-related harms and responsible gaming.

Yesterday, the NCRG announced the launch of its College Gambling Awareness Campaign, which includes the addition of several new resources to www.CollegeGambling.org.

Next week, the NCRG will hold its second free webinar of 2014. Titled “Preventing Disordered Gambling among College Students,” this March 19 webinar (2 – 3:30 p.m. ET) will feature Dr. Clayton Neighbors, professor and director of the social psychology program in the department of psychology at the University of Houston, who will discuss a new resource that was developed to help reduce problem gambling by showing students their misperceptions of student gambling behavior.

Approximately 75 percent of college students in the U.S. gambled in the past year and 6 percent develop a gambling problem. Despite these research findings, there was no screening/brief interventions tailored for this population—until now.

In 2011, the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) introduced www.CollegeGambling.org, a website designed to help university administrators, campus health professionals, students and parents address these issues using the latest research on college gambling and free resources to incorporate into existing campus-wide education programs.

This month, the NCRG is adding some new features to CollegeGambling.org to raise awareness about gambling and gambling-related harms on college campuses. The NCRG will release several new resources to help college health professionals and college administrators educate students and faculty about this important issue so they can make responsible decisions about gambling. To learn how you can get involved, please join the NCRG for an informational Google Hangout session on Tuesday, March 11.

As part of the NCRG’s continuing effort to educate stakeholders about gambling disorders and responsible gaming, members of the NCRG staff will be traveling across the nation to conduct treatment provider workshops, speak at national conferences and meet with new groups to discuss the research and resources that the NCRG has to offer. Amy Martin, communications and outreach manager for the NCRG, will be blogging about her experiences on the road as she helps reach out to new audiences for the NCRG. Amy recently traveled to Columbia, Mo., to co-present at the NCAA Missouri Gambling Summit with Dr. Matthew Martens of the University of Missouri – Columbia.

In 2009, the NCRG’s Task Force on College Gambling Policies recommended that colleges and universities promote understanding of gambling disorders as a mental health issue and provide assessment and intervention resources to address gambling disorders among college students. To assist schools with this recommendation and provide science-based tools to address gambling and gambling-related harms on college campuses, the NCRG launched www.CollegeGambling.org, a comprehensive online resource, in March 2011.

Research shows that approximately 75 percent of college students gambled during the past year, whether legally or illegally. Researchers from Montclair State University  recently published a study about problem gambling awareness messages on college counseling center websites (CCW) to determine what types of information students received about gambling disorders and treatment (McKinley & Wright, 2011). This study further highlights the need for resources like CollegeGambling.org.

On June 1, the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) hosted its second webinar of 2011, which provided an overview of the organization’s new resource, CollegeGambling.org, as well as the latest

Click below for the NCRG blog team’s exclusive interview with Dr. Matthew Martens, associate professor of educational, school and counseling psychology at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Nathan Smith, program officer for the NCRG, sat down with Dr. Martens to discuss brief interventions for problem gambling and gives advice to campus health professionals on how to address gambling and gambling-related harms on campus.

Measuring addictive behaviors accurately is very difficult. Among the many complications are recruiting subjects, relying on their memory and self-report and quantifying the difference between pathological actions and actions that are merely unusual or uncommon. (Jerome Wakefield, Ph.D., discussed this topic in detail at the NCRG conference 2010.) One particularly difficult aspect of studying addiction is the diagnostic screening instrument (when scored, the instrument shows whether or not a person should be diagnosed with a particular disorder). Diagnostic screens of all kinds pose the problem of advancement versus consistency: It is always possible to make a newer and better instrument, but a new instrument means that studies conducted with the older one cannot be directly compared to studies conducted with the new instrument. This tension dictates that new instruments must be shown as better along several lines to make them worth implementing. Two researchers at the forefront of this discussion for gambling disorders are Erica Fortune and Adam Goodie, Ph.D., at the University of Georgia. Fortune and Goodie recently published a study, partly funded by a grant from the NCRG to Dr. Goodie, that compares the performance of two diagnostic screens in a population of college students (Fortune & Goodie, 2010).