Responding to and Reducing Gambling Problems Studies (Regaps) is a new Swedish research program on gambling in Sweden. It is funded by the research council Forte and planned to run for six years. Regaps is based at the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Stockholm.
(The following is based on the program description) The aim of Regaps is to provide helpful information in redesigning treatment and other responses to individual problematic gambling, and strategies to prevent and reduce problem gambling. The program will study gambling in five frames of reference.
- The societal handling of problem gamblers. Areas of investigation include how gambling problems are defined, how caregiving personnel and agencies respond to help seekers, and how treatment provision affects and fits into the life trajectory of problem gamblers.
- Measurement of gambling problems. The program will develop and test appropriate instruments for measuring, in the Swedish context, aspects of gambling behavior, problems and dependence.
- Comorbidity. The study will contribute to disentangling overlaps and establishing time-ordering between problem gambling and other psychiatric disorders.
- Policy development and impact. The program will draw on reviews of studies of the effects of gambling regulation, and as it becomes appropriate will conduct policy impact studies on changes in Swedish gambling policies.
- International comparison. The program will set Swedish developments in treatment monitoring and policy measures concerning gambling in a cross-national comparative context.
In practical terms, the program aims to offer analyses which foster the improvement of Swedish responses to problem gambling. The research consortium is also committed to fostering a critical perspective on epidemiology and treatment service studies. It will also contribute evidence which would point future policy toward greater social re-inclusion as well as more effective reduction of problems caused by gambling.
Project coordinator: Jenny Cisneros Örnberg. Program members: Kristina Sundqvist, Eva Samuelsson, Peter Wennberg, Jukka Törrönen, Robin Room, Ludwig Kraus, Anne H. Berman, Ingeborg Rossow, Rachel Volberg, David Forsström and Per Binde. My role in the project is mostly advisory.
Regaps is to date the largest and most ambitious university-based research program on gambling in Sweden. I look forward working with the Regaps team!
For Swedes:
> Read more about Regaps
2 comments
As an expert, what would you say the rules for affiliate marketing of licensed operators after re-regulation in Sweden should be? How should they be controlled? Would it help to make them more responsible, if they would need to obtain a license, as well, in order to do the advertising?
Author
I might now a bit about gambling, but I am not an expert on juridical matters. But I suppose that under the proposed new legislation, anyone may promote the services of gambling companies that have a license in Sweden, if it is done within the framework of the new gambling law and other Swedish laws that concern marketing more generally. I believe that control of marketing will be carried out in essentially the same way as it is today: the Gambling authority regularly and systematically views samples of mass media and report to the police marketing that it considers to be illegal. The authority also receives tip-offs from the public and stakeholders in the gambling sector about unlawful marketing of gambling.
> The marketing of gambling, Chapter 15 and 19 (§2) in the proposed new Gambling Law (Spellag).
> The Commercial Practices Act (Marknadsföringslagen).