We recommend that the British Gambling Prevalence Survey be reinstated as a first step towards understanding how gambling and gambling prevalence are changing in the UK. Longitudinal surveys 272. This, however, would only be a first step. Prevalence surveys rely on retrospective and subjective self-reports, and generally cannot be done with more than a few thousand participants at one time https://www.suissecasinoenligne.com/revues/jackpot-city/.

This means that a prevalence survey cannot usefully answer the question of gambling-related suicide or mortality. Even a sequence of prevalence surveys would generally only be considered a repeated cross-sectional design and not a longitudinal study. Methodologies that can survey a broader range of the population, or that can provide objective measures of gambling involvement and harm, should be considered if they emerge.

A longitudinal study is a study that tracks the same individuals over time, such as the 1958 National Child Development Study which follows lifetime outcomes for an initial sample of 17,415 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1958.308 By contrast, the three British National Gambling Prevalence Surveys effectively follow a “repeated cross-sectional” design, since new people are predominately sampled at each time point.

Both methodologies should be equally effective for some research questions, such as estimating the proportion of the population who are problem gamblers. Longitudinal studies, however, are uniquely capable of probing causal factors such as why some people are more likely to become problem gamblers, since data can be collected from the same person over all stages of the lifespan.