Online gambling, encompassing a wide variety of activities and around-the-clock access, can be a potential risk factor for gamblers who tend to gamble excessively. Yet, the advent of online gambling has enabled responsible gambling features that may help individuals to limit their gambling behaviour. One of these is tools that track gamblers’ behaviour, performs risk assessments and provides advice to gamblers. Today a new study was accepted for publication that investigated users’ views and experiences of the responsible gambling tool Playscan. This was done from a qualitative perspective using a semi-structured interview.
The Playscan tool performs a risk assessment on a three-step scale (low, medium and high risk). Users from each risk category were included. A total of 20 face-to-face interviews were carried out and analysed using thematic analysis.
Two main themes with associated sub-themes were identified: “Usage of Playscan and the gambling site” and “Experiences of Playscan”. Important experiences in the sub-themes were lack of feedback from the tool and confusion when signing up to use Playscan. Possible actions to counter this was discussed in the paper.
Read the full paper:
Forsström, D., Jansson-Fröjmark, M., Hesser, H., & Carlbring, P. (2017). Experiences of Playscan: Interviews with users of a responsible gambling tool. Internet Interventions, 8, 53-62. doi:10.1016/j.invent.2017.03.003