Comparing the Efficacy of an Online Gambling Intervention to a no Intervention Control Condition

Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Gambling Problem

Treatments: Behavioral: Online Gambling Internet Intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03124589

01/19/2017

Details and patient eligibility

About

Online interventions for gambling problems hold a strong potential to help people with gambling concerns. However, there are no trials, to-date, that have been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of such an intervention. The current trial will compare participants provided access to an online gambling intervention to those assigned by chance to a no intervention condition in order to test the efficacy of one such Internet intervention for gambling.

Participants will be recruited through Amazon's MTurk crowdsourcing platform. Potential participants identified as problem gamblers who are interested in quitting or reducing their gambling in the next 6 months, or often think about it, based on an initial survey will be invited to complete additional surveys at 6 weeks and 6 months. Those who then agree to be followed up will be randomized to access an online intervention for gambling or a no-intervention website. These participants will then be contacted again at 6 weeks and 6 months to ask about their gambling, and their impressions of the online intervention. The primary hypothesis to be tested is that participants receiving access to the online gambling intervention will report a greater reduction in number of days gambling and in NODS scores at 6-month follow-up than participants in the no intervention control condition.

Enrollment: 321 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• 18 years of age or over
• A score of 5 or over on the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI)
• Thinking about cutting down or quitting their gambling (in next 6 months, or state that they are thinking about it most or almost all of the time)
• Willingness to complete a 6-week and 6-month follow-up survey

Trial design

Primary purpose: Other

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

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321 participants in 2 patient groups

No Intervention

No Intervention group

Description:

A questionnaire that asks individuals what components of an online intervention they might find useful.

Online Gambling Internet Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

An online gambling Internet intervention (housed at CAMH and developed based on the self-help materials created by Professor David Hodgins)

Treatment:

Behavioral: Online Gambling Internet Intervention