Preface

Summary

This monograph provided the opportunity to describe a programme of gambling research completed at the School of Psychology, University of Western Sydney and to discuss the results in the context of contemporary research into problem and pathological gambling. As the principal researchers were mainly very able and independent-minded doctoral students the “programme” was by no means a coherent, planned sequence. Nonetheless, in the context of ongoing personal research, other postgraduate projects and collaboration with other academic staff, the body of work completed over the past 5 years or so has made some inroads on the agenda outlined in Dickerson & Baron (2000): by studying regular gamblers to focus on the psychological processes that erode and maintain subjective self-control over gambling behaviour.

The Australian gambling context provided a unique research opportunity having, as it does, significant populations of men and women who regularly engage in continuous forms of gambling such as electronic gaming machine (EGM) play, off-course betting and casino table games: the debt owed to those players who volunteered is acknowledged and the gratitude expressed to them previously repeated here. Whether they were involved in surveys, qualitative interviews or experimental studies, the research was utterly dependent on their participation.

The evolution of the ideas and methods was often a direct function of the success of the individuals in the PhD programme, independent and responsive to advice rather than supervision, from founding member, now co-author (J. O'Connor), to John Haw, Andrew Kyngdon, Robyn Maddern, and still to complete, Morten Boyer and Lee Shepherd.