Diagnosing Your Gambling Behavior

The compulsive behavior can start with the first loss of money, or even before walking into a gambling den with minds full of dreams at winning big, or perhaps just enjoying the thrill. But once the unsettling feeling starts bothering the mind even outside the gambling floor, the problem can be leading for the worst it can be.

A VERY fascinating aspect of research is questionnaire validation. And by its nature it can be madugo, a Tagalog term that the English literal translation “bloody” cannot quite capture.

Your questionnaire must be acceptably sensitive (detects what it is designed to detect); positively predictive (predicts what it is designed to predict); and negatively predictive (does not predict what it is not designed to predict).

You also have the privilege of understanding better the behavior you want to study later on. A case in point is a study by Rachel Vilberg, Ingrid Munck and Nancy Petry that the American Journal of Addiction published in May last year. The study aimed to enhance screening capability of the Nods-Clip questionnaire, itself an enhancement of the National Opinion Research Center (Norc) DSM-IV Screen for Gambling Problems. (Nods refers to Norc Diagnostic Screen for gambling disorders.)

The Nods has a sensitivity of 98 percent for lifetime pathological gamblers and 90 percent of lifetime problem gamblers. Using three criteria of loss of control, lying and preoccupation (Clip), the Nods-Clip detects 99 percent of Nods pathological gamblers and 94 percent of Nods problem gamblers. But it cannot discriminate at-risk and low-risk gamblers.

So Nods-Perc was conducted to correct this. It used the criteria of preoccupation, escape, risked relationships and chasing (or Perc). And it did. It is 99.7 percent sensitive (very high); 88.5 percent positively predictive (better than Nods-Clip); and 96.3 percent negatively predictive (far better).

I am bringing this up in Breakthroughs because the findings gave an exceptional insight into the gambling behavior. If you have gambling problems, it will be an opportune time for self-diagnosis.

If you answer “No” to all the four criteria below, consider yourself... [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 12 December 2012.

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