I was proud to be the lead author on a paper which recently won the Public Health Journal Paper of the Year award. Our paper, "What is the evidence that advertising policies could have an impact on gambling-related harms?", highlights the urgent need to regulate and limit gambling advertising. This is part of a growing body of research into gambling being done across the Sheffield Addictions Research Group and I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of the other work currently underway.
I'm close to completing my PhD exploring the impact of policies which restrict gambling advertising around live sports broadcasts. My work uses econometric methods to understand how an industry self-regulatory advertising restriction (the 'whistle-to-whistle' ban) has changed the presence of gambling advertising on television around live football programmes and the rest of the UK television network.
My other work includes an umbrella review on the evidence for advertising having an impact on gambling-related harms (the award-winning paper mentioned above), and also a quasi-experimental study exploring the impact of TV advertising on gambling behaviour during the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Esther Moore's PhD is focused on developing a public health economic model which can be used to predict the impact of policies which influence gambling on the prevalence of gambling-harm in England and Scotland. As part of this work, she has published an analysis looking at the impact of problem gambling severity on health-related quality of life.
Elsewhere in the team Professor Matt Field (psychologist) and Dr Rob Pryce (health economist) have been involved in work producing estimates of the number of gamblers in need of treatment or support by local authorities in England.
We are hopeful that gambling research within SARG will continue to grow. In 2024, the University of Sheffield became part of an NIHR Policy Research Unit (PRU) in Addictions. This has opened up opportunities to collaborate on cross-addictions research, including working with the University of Glasgow's Gambling Research Group who are leading the PRU's gambling work.
Last month, the government announced that 20% of the new levy on gambling companies will go towards research. This is great news for gambling research and will hopefully foster exciting opportunities for us to grow our work within SARG.