engleski

Youth gambling - comparison of high-school and university students

Studies continuously confirm a greater prevalence of problem gambling among young people, with this referring to both high school pupils (Derevensky & Gupta, 2000 ; Ricijas et al., 2016) and student population (Williams et al., 2006 ; Dodig et al., 2014). Expectedly, in countries with high gambling availability such as Croatia, these trends are even more visible. Therefore, it is not surprising that the largest share (12, 3%) of young problem gamblers in Europe was measured in Croatia on a sample of high-school pupils (Calado, Alexandre & Griffiths, 2017). The answer to the question whether similar results can be expected when it comes to university students was sought within the international research “Attitudes and stigma toward gambling in different social context – an international comparison”, involving university students from Croatia, Israel, Canada and Australia. In this paper, the focus will be on the subsample of Croatian students (n=699, m=46, 9%, f=51, 8%) and on the results obtained with the Questionnaire of gambling activities and Problem Gambling Severity Index (Ferris & Wynne, 2001). These results will be compared to those from a Croatian national prevalence study involving high school students (n=2702, m=49, 2%, f=50, 8%) who completed the identical gambling activity questionnaire and Canadian Adolescent Gambling Inventory (Tremblay et al. 2010). The study revealed that high-school students, when compared to university students, are gambling more and they are developing gambling-related problems to a greater extent. These findings will be interpreted in relation to possible significant influence of maturation and gambling as adolescence-limited behaviour, as well as in relation to the fact that students are a positively selected group of young people.

gambling, problem gambling, youth gambling, high-school students, university students

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