collegegambling.org

For college students, fall can be a time where they place bets on college football games and arrange their lineup in their fantasy football leagues. Researchers have found that about 75 percent of college students have gambled in the past year and about 6 percent have experienced problems with their gambling (Barnes, Welte, Hoffman, & Tidwell, 2010).  One recent study has started to address this issue by putting to the test two promising treatment methods for college students experiencing gambling problems in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) (Larimer et al., 2011).

This study is of special interest to us at the NCRG because we recently funded one of the researchers to develop an online version of a personalized feedback intervention, one of the treatments tested in this article, for our web-based resource about gambling on college campuses: www.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.

The National Center for Responsible Gaming launched www.CollegeGambling.org this week as part of its ongoing efforts to develop tools to help higher education institutions address gambling disorders and responsible gaming on campus.  The first site of its kind, CollegeGambling.org is a comprehensive resource to help current and prospective students, campus administrators, campus health professionals and parents address gambling and gambling-related harms on campus. The site is a valuable resource for those interested in learning more about college gambling, including information about responsible gaming for students of legal age to gamble and resources for those who may encounter problems. As a part of this launch, the NCRG sat down with Patricia Ketcham, Ph.D., CHES, chair of the CollegeGambling.org Advisory Committee, to learn her perspective on the new site.

Today, the National Center for Responsible Gaming (NCRG) launched www.CollegeGambling.org, a new resource to help colleges and universities address gambling and gambling-related harms on campus. View the press release announcing the launch.

The first site of its kind,CollegeGambling.org brings together the latest research and best practices in responsible gaming and the field of addiction awareness and prevention in order to provide a substantive and versatile resource that will help schools and their students address this important issue in the way that best fits each school’s needs. School administrators are encouraged to use the College Policy Toolkit including on the site, and campus health professionals can easily locate and distribute the CollegeGambling.org materials in their health centers.  

How much college students gamble, and to what extent they suffer from gambling disorders, is an area of great concern in the United States. It is well established that college students suffer from high rates of alcohol and other substance use disorders, and do so in larger numbers than demographically similar non-college students. It is also commonly known that alcohol misuse and gambling disorders are similar in many ways; both cause craving and withdrawal symptoms, have similar neurological characteristics and follow similar clinical courses. This fact raises questions about whether gambling disorders may be found in larger numbers in college populations than in non-college populations with similar demographics. To answer this question, researchers at the Research Institute on Addictions at the University at Buffalo, N.Y., analyzed data from 1,000 representative respondents ages 18-21. Their findings were published in the Journal of American College Health (Barnes, Welte, Hoffman, & Tidwell, 2010).

The National Center for Responsible Gaming recently announced the formation of an advisory committee to guide the development of a new website to help colleges and universities address gambling and gambling problems among students. Scheduled to launch in 2011, collegegambling.org will provide a host of free, science-based resources to administrators, student health and life professionals, current and prospective college students and parents. The new website answers the call issued by the Task Force on College Gambling Policies to disseminate research-based harm reduction strategies and programs to U.S. colleges and universities. Because only about one-fifth of U.S. colleges and universities have a gambling policy, the task force identified the need to provide science-based, accessible resources to schools interested in addressing gambling on their campuses.

The National Center for Responsible Gaming recently announced the formation of an advisory committee to guide the development of a new website to help colleges and universities address gambling and gambling problems among students. Scheduled to launch in 2011, collegegambling.org will provide a host of free, science-based resources to administrators, student health and life professionals, current and prospective college students and parents. The new website answers the call issued by the Task Force on College Gambling Policies to disseminate research-based harm reduction strategies and programs to U.S. colleges and universities. Because only about one-fifth of U.S. colleges and universities have a gambling policy, the task force identified the need to provide science-based, accessible resources to schools interested in addressing gambling on their campuses.