New Study Finds College Students Are More Likely to Gamble Online

A new study shows that 5% of adults have gambled on the internet in the past year. The gender gap is somewhat narrower among women, though. Most of these people said they are not comfortable gambling on the internet. Lack of access to the internet was cited as the main reason for not playing games on the web. But the study also found that eight percent of adults had gambled on the net in the past year, and younger people were more likely to be involved in online gambling.

The inclusion criteria included college students aged 18 to 24 who reported playing online at least twice a month. Recruitment was done in two ways. First, researchers screened incoming first-year students of two large Canadian universities by having them fill out a brief questionnaire on online gambling and then asked them to answer several questions about their experience with gambling. Then, they recruited participants for focus groups based on these results. The second recruitment method involved advertising in large classrooms and visiting large universities.

The inclusion criteria for the study were college students aged eighteen to twenty-four and reporting online gambling at least twice a month. The researchers recruited the participants by using two methods: a simple internet search, or visiting a large classroom on campus. Another method was to advertise at two different universities and a community forum to promote the risk of gambling. These methods worked well in the current study, and a more detailed evaluation is expected in the coming months.