Article : Measuring the perceived risk of “gambling responsibly”

Anne-Claire PIN*, Karine PICOT-COUPEY**, Olivier DROULERS**
* Université de Bretagne Sud - IREA EA 4251
** Université de Rennes 1 - Institut de Gestion de Rennes (IGR-IAE) - CREM UMR CNRS 6211

Abstract

Objectives: Responsible gambling consists in a set of practices and politics aiming at reducing the development of excessive gambling behaviors. This paper contributes to conceptualize the perceived risk of adopting a responsible gambling practices. It presents the first three stages of a scale development to measure it.
Method: We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with gamblers in a French casino. We analyzed the resulting corpus of 190 pages manually in a conceptualizing way. Then, a questionnaire survey with 134 gamblers was conducted in situ. We analyzed the data with an exploratory factor analysis.
Results: The concept of perceived risk of adopting a responsible gambling behavior is defined as the gamblers’ subjective and uncertain perception of potential losses related to the prospect of adopting a responsible gambling behavior. The content conceptualizing analysis revealed five constituent dimensions of this perceived risk. The exploratory quantitative study allows validating a five-dimensional structure of the construct of perceived risk, different from that initially defined which leads to precise it: the perceived risk of living less excitement, of being less socialized, of winning less money, of earning less money and of having less distraction.
Conclusion: The results show that gamblers perceive a risk of adopting a responsible gambling behavior. This health behavior challenges gambling motivations and is perceived as a risky alternative to excessive gambling.