I was fortunate enough to attend the European Association of Gambling Studies conference in Vienna a couple of weeks back and the EASG have kindly posted the presentations on their website. There is a lot of really interesting information posted, and whilst it will take a long time to review them all, I’m going to give you some links to some of the sessions I attended.
Alex Blaszczynski from the University of Sydney gave a thought-provoking presentation on approaches to better understand the relationship between internet addiction and gambling whilst John McMullan from Saint Mary’s University (Canada) demonstrated an immense knowledge and understanding of online poker marketing and promotion and what this means from a responsible gambling perspective.
For a more detailed look at new thinking into problem gambling detection, I heard Tony Schellinck from Dalhousie University (Canada) give an overview of the work they are undertaking on developing FLAGS, a screen which acts as an early warning system to measure problem gambling risk. Joerg Haefeli from Lucerne University (Switzerland) gave an interesting overview of early detection research based on call centre data and his colleague Suzanne Lischer built on this when talking about early detection processes for problem gambling.
An increasing area of interest in academia is the link between youth gambling and social media, with presentations from Jani Kinnunen from the University of Tampere (Finland) and Jennifer Reynolds from the University of Toronto.
Finally, Sally Gainsbury from Southern Cross University (Australia) in Parallel Session 1 talked about the effectiveness of online interventions in the treatment of problem gambling and Henrietta Bowden-Jones told us about the great work she and her team are undertaking at the UK’s first NHS National Problem Gambling Clinic.
I could go on and on as there were many many other interesting talks and presentations but I would be here for some time!
