The Gambling Harms Scales: Instruments to assess impact to gamblers and affected others that are benchmarked to health utility

Harms from gambling can negatively affect an individual’s health and quality of life, as well as the people close to them.

This project set out to develop and validate new measures of gambling-related harm for both people who gamble, and those affected by someone else’s gambling.

The two main instruments currently in use to evaluate the personal and population impact of gambling are the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) and the 10-item binary scored Short Gambling Harms Screen (SGHS). The SGHS has been shown to be reliable and valid, but has received criticism for some of the nominated harm symptoms, which may be either inconsequential, or reflective of costs that do not impact on health.

This study developed a general framework for validating gambling-related harm measures, like the SGHS. This involved measuring the health of people who reported gambling-related harm, and comparing them to a similar group (matched on risk factors) who do not experience gambling-related harm. The study statistically controlled for other elements that might affect health (like alcohol use or disability), an approach that did not require subjective attribution of the impacts from gambling, which could be prone to upward bias due to stigma towards gambling.

As a result, the authors have developed a novel set of measures in short and long scales – the GHS-10 and GHS-20. They also developed versions for affected others (people affected by someone else’s gambling): the GHS-10-AO and GHS-20-AO. As a suite, the measures can be used for assessing gambling-related harm in research and for monitoring population impacts of gambling.

The authors recommend the use of these measures to jurisdictions and researchers who need an internally consistent, robust and well-validated index of gambling-related harm.