Abstrakt

The relationship between irrational gambling beliefs and gambling behavior: application of autoregressive cross-lagged modeling.

Young Ran Yeun, Dong Il Chun, Hee Yeong Woo

The purpose of this study was to identify the longitudinal causality between gambling beliefs and gambling behavior. An online survey was conducted 3 times across 10 months (January, May, and October) among adult gamblers (N=340) who had more than one year of regular gambling behavior, at least once a month (N=340, 64.7% males). The mean age of the subjects was 40.34 y (SD=0.43). The causality between irrational gambling beliefs and gambling behavior was analysed using autoregressive cross-lagged modeling. Analysis showed that gambling beliefs affected gambling behavior after 5 months (B=0.152, p<0.001), and gambling behavior also affected gambling beliefs after 5 months (B=0.090, p<0.01). These results explain that there is a mutual causality between irrational gambling beliefs and gambling behavior. Thus, the gambling disorder treatment programs should take into account not only cognitive behavioral theory but the cognitive dissonance perspective.