A Review of the Literature on Online Gambling Risks and Protective Factors

Online Gambling is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. Millions of people gamble every day. However, it’s important to be aware of the risks associated with gambling online and to make sure you are able to play responsibly. It’s also important to find out if gambling is legal in your state and abide by age limits. If you think that your gambling has become a problem, consider taking GamCare’s online assessment tool.

In the current literature, there is a considerable amount of research regarding the risk and protective factors for online gambling. The objective of this review is to investigate the knowledge that has been accumulated in recent years about these factors, by conducting a systematic search in three different academic databases: PubMed, PsychInfo and Scopus. The syntax entered was “gambling” combined with “online, internet, interactive”, and the search was limited to peer-reviewed articles.

Within the selected articles, the majority of variables investigated have been at the individual level, with a scarcity of studies on the contextual and relational levels. Nonetheless, several papers point to the fact that a low quantity and quality of relationships is more likely to be related with an online gambling mode; while a university context seems to increase the probability of using the online gambling modality (Mihaylova et al., 2013). Additionally, some authors report that having family members who are problematic gamblers increases the likelihood of being an internet gambler.