Gambling Research Glasgow

The Money and Debt project used mixed methods to investigate the complex intersections of money, gambling and debt. The study purposely recruited a qualitative sample of gamblers drawn from participants who took part in the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Study and the British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2010. Analysis suggested the existence of four kinds of gamblers categorized by both their approach to gambling spending as well as their approach to their general spending: ‘controlled gamblers’, ‘uncontrolled gamblers’, ‘uncontrolled spenders’ and ‘chaotic spenders’. The study also proposed an ‘ecological model’ to capture the different types of personal and environmental factors that influenced people's financial decisions. These included cognitive factors, control and compulsion, normative spending, resources and financial management, and the wider credit environment.