Our head of statistics, Helen Bryce, talks through the launch of the second wave of data from the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, and the plans for the future.
Posted 10 July 2024 by Helen Bryce
We have recently published the second wave of data from the new Gambling Survey for Great Britain (GSGB). The findings are based on responses from 5,003 people from across the country who kindly agreed to take part in our survey between November 2023 and February 2024.
This is the second publication of official statistics from the GSGB and like the first, this wave specific publication focuses on the gambling activities that people have participated in and how they have taken part. We’ve also published data on why people gamble, which shows that most people take part for fun or for the chance to win money. As part of our research we asked people who had gambled in the last 12 months to rate how they felt about their last gambling experience. We found 41 percent rated it positively whereas 22 percent expressed negative feelings towards it. Over one third (37 percent) said they neither loved nor hated their last gambling experience.
A number of stakeholders were also interested in the findings from the Short Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS) questions that are asked in the GSGB. SWEMWBS is a short version of the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing scale which measures the mental wellbeing of the population. There are seven questions which make up the scale and we have published the metric score that was collected in both Wave 1 and Wave 2 of the GSGB as well as data that was collected in the developmental stages of the GSGB.
On the 25 July, we will be publishing the first annual report of the GSGB. For the first year, this is based on data collected across two waves from July 2023 to February 2024 (10,000 responses), but in future years our annual reports will be based on four waves of data collected across the calendar year (20,000 responses). By combining responses across multiple waves we’ll be able to go into more detail about how responses vary across different population sub groups, and will also publish more data in the annual report about the consequences of gambling.
For more information about the Gambling Survey for Great Britain, please go to our website where you can find information about the development of the GSGB and latest publications. Based on user feedback we have also implemented some changes to our Statistics and Research Hub to more clearly label which of our publications are official statistics and as usual you can find out when official statistics are due for publication in our publication calendar.