Editorial
Gambling – no ordinary
commodity
Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs
2019, Vol. 36(2) 63–65
ª The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1455072519826739
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Matilda Hellman
University of Helsinki, Finland
Gambling is no ordinary commodity. As a phenomenon it is fabricated and learned socially
and culturally. In order to spend money on a
game, humans must not only learn the logic
of the game (“four cherries in a row are worth
more than three hats”) but they must also be
internalised in a (il)logical bundle of justifications in terms of the value of doing so (“it is
fun”; “I will become rich”, or “If I play enough
times, the likelihood of winning increases”). In
this issue of Nordic Studies on Alcohol and
Drugs the latter circumstance of a cultural internalisation is demonstrated by Egerer and Marionneau’s (2019) article on cultures and the
convenience of gambling among Finnish and
French gamblers. Their study shows that the
activity has a different cultural position in the
two countries: the internalising into gambling
belongs in Finland to the sphere of everyday
life, but in France it is connected with the peculiarities of the casino environment (see also
Marionneau, 2015). This makes gambling such
an intriguing case for cultural studies.
In many countries, lottery games and other
gambling activities were first provided and
handled by civil society associations in order
to collect incomes for their work. This is indeed
a practical way of generating money: readers
are likely, for example, to be familiar with
school events where there is a lottery, and the
revenues go to a school trip or some other venture that supports the children’s school atmosphere or educational path.
When a need arose by jurisdictions to regulate gambling more thoroughly, it was primarily
for fiscal reasons (Sulkunen et al., 2018). In
addition, there were a string of issues attached
to this question of regulation: who was to gain
revenues from gambling and how much; who
was allowed to play; and where should the gambling activities take place? The bigger the gambling industry grew, the more questions
followed – and appeared to have been overlooked historically.
Now that the global gambling market is worth
almost 500 billion USD gross yield (Statista,
2018), there is a great societal demand for
making gambling policy a more integrated
object of sociological, social political, and
political science research. This thematic issue
of NAD tries to answer this need by filling a
small part of the gap in the Nordic literature.
Corresponding author:
Matilda Hellman, University of Helsinki, PB 18 (Unioninkatu 35), Helsinki 00014, Finland.
Email: matilda.hellman@nordicwelfare.org
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64
Habits and adherent harms
Not only is gambling an activity that makes
people lose a lot of money, but it also harms
the wellbeing of the gamblers and their next of
kin and has been shown to involve several
types of stratifying effects (Oksanen, Sirola,
Savolainen, & Kaakinen, 2019). Gamblingrelated harm disadvantageously affects the
socioeconomically weak in particular, and in
the study by Latvala, Alho, Raisamo, and Salonen (2019) people who perform less well at
school measured in register data’s Grade Point
Average (GPA) are shown to be more likely to
gamble more frequently and to prefer certain
kinds of games.
The ways in which gambling activity levels
and harms materialise in different populations
become more complicated when studied in different age cohorts taking other behaviours into
consideration. The study by Svensson and
Sundqvist (2019) on gambling habits among
students aged 15 and 17 years in Sweden shows
that some types of alcohol and drug use are
associated with less gambling. There were no
school-related factors that showed associations
with gambling except skipping classes among
11th graders, which was associated with less frequent gambling. The ways in which gambling is
associated with alcohol and drug use can vary
with age. In this study there were no great associations in the 15 and 17 years age groups.
Measuring gambling activities and associated harms through surveys that provide a
choice of answers for their participants can
involve some questions of validity. This is
demonstrated in an inquiry into gamblers’
interpretations of the questions posed in the
screening instrument for the Problem Gambling Severity Index (Samuelsson, Wennberg,
& Sundqvist, 2019). Ambiguous answers
resulted from misinterpretations, recall bias,
language difficulties, selective memory, and
a tendency to only answer one part of a question. There are different ways ahead when such
problems arise. A necessary one is to drill
deeper into the art of making surveys and
Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 36(2)
questionnaires comprehensible and applicable
to different kinds of populations.
Regulation
What scientific concepts can we use for understanding harm caused by gambling on a societal
level over time and in relation to different interventions? In her study, Rossow (2019) turns to
an alcohol research field classic: the total consumption model (TCM). In this, there is a
strong association between the total consumption and the prevalence of excessive/harmful
consumption in a population. This model,
which has not to the same extent been trialled
for gambling before, is investigated on the basis
of 12 empirical studies. All but one of these
studies found empirical support for the TCM.
Rossow’s conclusion is therefore credible: even
if the literature that lends empirical support to
the TCM is small, it is consistent.
The value of this result cannot be stressed
enough, especially when we get into the area of
regulation. Gambling operators have long
stressed the importance of their own selfregulation in terms of so-called responsible
gambling (RG). The value of RG is highly contested. Forsström and Cisneros Örnberg (2019)
compare the two kinds of gambling markets
operators in Sweden – licensed companies and
non-Swedish based companies that sell their
products online. Their study shows how the
RG concept relies on certain constructs of problem gambling and that companies in both categories seemed to believe that provision of RG
instruments on their websites was sufficient for
preventing harmful gambling. While Sweden is
now going through the great transformation of
introducing a licence model for their gambling
market regulation system, Nikkinen (2019) suggests a bolder alternative, namely the licensing
of individual gamblers. He shows the ways in
which such a system would include some benefits such as the possibility of educating customers of the odds of winning and the risks of
harms before the gambling activity takes place.
That licences would only be issued to adults
65
Hellman
would also reduce the need for age verification
on-site.
It is with great pride that NAD publishes this
issue with so many interesting studies of high
standard. And the Nordic research is likely to
increase in quality and strength in the years to
come: the Joint Committee for Nordic Research
Councils in the Humanities and the Social
Sciences (NOS-HS) announced in December
2018 that it will support a Nordic cooperation
network in the field of gambling studies.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Matilda Hellman works as the
director of a research group which research on gambling and which is partly funded in the context of the
§52 in the Finnish Lottery Act. The funding stems
from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and is
channelled through a cooperation contract with the
National Institute of Health and Welfare.
ORCID iD
Matilda Hellman
8884-8601
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-
References
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Forsström, D., & Cisneros Örnberg, J. (2019).
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