Grey literature is a necessary facet in a critical approach to gambling research
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00:00
Computer animation
07:19
Diagram
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
My name is David Baxter. I'm a master's student at University of Alberta and affiliated with the Alberta Gambling Research Institute. I was formerly the information specialist at the Gambling Research Exchange in Ontario, Canada. I'm also the chair of the GrayNet Education and Training Committee, which Scott presented on earlier.
00:24
I'll just take a moment to add from that that we did have some resources suggested from non-English language sources. We haven't been able to incorporate them yet. We will next year. Our committee members are all either Canadian or American.
00:43
We may be calling on the rest of the GrayNet community to really help us internationalize that. On to my own presentation. Thank you everyone for staying to the end of the conference program. Today I'll be telling you about a project where we're applying grey literature to a critical analysis of gambling research.
01:11
I will tell you why it's interesting to talk about gambling and the grey literature of gambling specifically. I'll tell you about our project and the results where we have compared the grey literature and the primary academic literature in gambling.
01:28
And then what you can look forward to from this project next year. So why gambling? The gambling industry has greatly expanded in the past 25 years. Just to give you a sense of the scale, in Canada in 2017, government gambling revenues were in excess of $14 billion.
02:02
Sorry, having a PowerPoint moment there. Commercial gambling is related to other risky commodities, like alcohol and tobacco, and has similar addiction issues.
02:23
Clinically diagnosed problem gambling affects 2.3% of people worldwide on average. Many others experience harm besides those 2.3%, their families, friends, and communities. And of course it disproportionately affects poor and racialized communities. Now why do we need this critical approach?
02:42
Well, in a previous review, we found that the research on gambling harm is very narrowly focused on the psychology of problem gambling, less so on gambling products themselves. However, this study didn't include grey literature. And then in general, policy relevant research on other risky commodities has a history of being bent to serve private interests.
03:03
But this hasn't been investigated in depth as much for gambling yet. So why the grey literature? So governments invest in gambling research as part of gambling liberalization.
03:22
So usually it's a small fraction of a percent of those gambling revenues, but that still ends up being millions of dollars in research funding, and a lot of it gets published as grey literature. As you know, grey literature has many unique values, but in the case of gambling, some of the important ones are countering publication bias.
03:42
It's generally more in-depth and detailed, and expected to cover other topics outside that narrow focus on psychological sciences. So the gambling grey literature gets used, but rarely gets reused. So an example in Australia, the Productivity Commission did this in-depth inquiry into gambling industry, published this detailed report, and
04:06
this led to all new legislation bringing in new gambling measures and really overhauling how gambling research is done in Australia. But as for how it's rarely reused, review articles and systematic reviews on gambling rarely include a grey literature search.
04:23
And the inclusion of grey literature is even actively discouraged in the gambling research community at times. So one example here is this white paper from the National Center for Responsible Gaming in the United States is called Responsible Gambling, a Review of the Research.
04:42
So I won't read the quote, but here they equate grey literature with unpublished file drawer research, concluding that grey literature, quote, represents little more than opinion and therefore cannot be trusted. And, you know, ironically, this, it's a white paper, which is itself grey literature. So to that,
05:00
all I can say is, you can't trust grey literature that tells you, you can't trust grey literature. One of our goals with this project is correct, to correct these misconceptions in the gambling research community. So for our project, we're conducting a systematic content analysis of 25 years of
05:22
gambling research from five countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries have similar histories of gambling expansion and share the common English language. This project will culminate in a monograph book titled Academic Integrity and Disciplinarity in Gambling Research, led by my supervisor Fiona Nickel.
05:42
In this book, we'll examine patterns of citation and influence in gambling research, analyze the effects of research funding sources, and it will include a comparative analysis of gambling research to research on video games. So for the pilot study, which I'm presenting today, we focus on the most recent five-year period of 2014 to 2018.
06:04
For the primary literature search, we did a broad keyword search for gambling and scope as a web of science. For the grey literature research, we used the Griot's Evidence Center, which is the single largest online library of grey literature on gambling and is, has strongest representation for these same five countries.
06:22
Then, for our analysis, we did a content analysis of each document. So for each one, we read the abstract keywords, purpose statements, and research questions to find out what is the issue that each study investigates, and then perform qualitative data analysis in the Atlas TI software to code and group these things into categories.
06:48
So just the raw results, the primary literature search yielded 1,292 articles and the grey literature search 360 reports primarily from government affiliated resources.
07:02
So I know it's not really a one-to-one comparison of a report, grey report to a journal article, but the proportion of grey documents ranged from 8% in the United States to 46% in New Zealand. And I'll note here that for the pilot study, we just used a single library, which is Canada-based.
07:24
So in these results, the Canadian grey literature may be overrepresented in this sample. But moving on to the top identified issues that were researched in each of these documents. From our content analysis, here are the top 10 issues identified in the primary and grey literature.
07:44
I'll first highlight what they have in common and what is unique to each. So in both, we see an interest in the same specific forms of gambling. So online gambling, slot machines, and sports betting are all of interest, as well as treatment of clinically diagnosed problem gambling.
08:07
So in the primary literature, which we previously found to be very focused on the psychology of individuals who gamble, we see that reflected here. So interest in certain types of individuals gambling, particularly young adults, children, and adolescents.
08:22
And what about them makes them want to gamble? So that's their characteristics, their gambling motivations, impulsivity, which is a psychological characteristic, and then the effects of advertising as well. Now, looking over at the grey literature, we see more interest in the whole population.
08:46
So with terms like prevalence and assessment and concern for gambling being harmful. So that's the top issue, health problems slash well-being, but also gambling harms, harm minimization, and then as well as responsible gambling.
09:04
So this term was coined in the early 2000 to refer to governments and casinos, providing gambling responsibly. But it's shifted and now is often used to refer to gamblers being responsible for their own gambling behavior, kind of shifting that blame away from governments and casinos.
09:24
For a great critique of this topic, I recommend what I've cited here, the Hancock and Smith's critique, The Distorted Reality of Responsible Gambling. So next, we looked at the disciplines of the research being done.
09:44
There were some limitations in the pilot study. So in the primary literature on the left, we coded it based on just how the journal identified. Is it a psychology journal, a psychiatry journal? The problem with this is that many journals identify as interdisciplinary, but of course the individual articles are not interdisciplinary.
10:04
For the grey literature, we manually coded based on the first author's academic affiliation or job title. But for many reports, that's not possible. So you see one third is not applicable because of an institutional author or it's just not listed.
10:23
So we found that where the data were available, the grey literature is generally more diverse, more categories. But if I cover up the small ones and we just focus on the big ones, we find that they're very similar. In the primary literature, kind of as expected, we see psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience as well as health to dominate.
10:44
The grey literature, which covers broader societal and population issues, we see health. We'd expect that to be big, but we might also expect to see a bit more social sciences and a bit less psychology. But they're pretty much the same percentage and I'll discuss what we think that means in a moment.
11:08
So what we found from this pilot study is that grey literature represents a significant portion of research being produced on gambling, as much as 45% of research documents in the case of New Zealand. The primary and grey literature research on gambling both have biases, but they balance each other out somewhat and should be taken together.
11:28
Even though grey literature covers these broader social, demographic and population issues, the authors are still very often psychology and health researchers. So what may be happening is because so much research is psychological, the government sponsored research is looking for gambling experts.
11:49
All those gambling experts happen to be psychologists and they may be called on to do non psychological research. So this shows us there's a need to develop really more space for non psychologists in the academic gambling
12:01
research so that we have a broader pool of gambling experts to do the grey literature government sponsored research. So what is next? Our book Academic Integrity and Disciplinarity in Gambling Research will be coming out next year from the University of Alberta Press.
12:20
In the spirit of open science, we will be publishing our bibliographic data sets in Griot's Gambling Research Data Repository. And to promote grey literature reuse in gambling studies, we will also be contributing the grey literature catalog to the Griot Evidence Center and promoting it further in the gambling research community.
12:41
For my own graduate research, I'll be doing further bibliometric analysis in the gambling research field to see which gambling grey literatures are most cited in the academic literature, particularly in reviews to see which are the most influential in gambling research and policy.
13:03
And I'll also be doing in depth interviews with gambling grey literature producers to complement this kind of big data quantitative analysis. And I'll be focusing on indigenous experts who have taken a really unique approaches to gambling harm, and especially their expertise is underrepresented in both the academic and grey literatures.
13:24
So I look forward to sharing more of this work with you next year. Thank you very much.