For researchers that study topics related to behavioural psychology and addiction, the data that comes from online gambling is a veritable gold mine of actionable intelligence.
In the days prior to the modernisation of the gambling industry, any analysis of behavioural patterns relied on things like manual data tracking from in-person operators or potentially unreliable surveys from the customers themselves.
The lack of reliable, granular data made it difficult to draw a detailed picture of the connections between a player’s behaviour and their overall exposure to risk.
How data fills in the blanks for safer gambling
Thanks to the richness of digital data, however, researchers today are starting to be able to fill in some of the blanks with empirical evidence.
We’re starting to understand more of the context, the causes and the effects of disordered gambling.
The industry is starting to make and test some data-driven predictions about where players sit on the risk spectrum based on the choices and behaviours they exhibit. We might even be able to get a sense of which games or game formats are inherently riskier than others from a safer-gambling standpoint.
Let’s dig into one recent study that explored the markers of gambling-related harm across various categories using data from a regulated website. There are a few tidbits that might be of interest to poker players, in particular.
Markers of harm for different gambling products
The paper we’re looking at is entitled Behavioural Markers of Harm and Their Potential in Identifying Product Risk in Online Gambling. It was commissioned by Kindred Group in 2022 and it covers a cohort of 100,000 of their UK customers across a period of six months.
The group of researchers included myself, as Kindred’s former head of responsible gambling and now the senior safer gambling consultant for SG:certified.
The purpose of the research was to explore whether certain products are more strongly associated with the established behavioural markers of harm than others. These markers have been uncovered through previous research and include:
