The limit maintenance model : temptation and restraint in gambling

A literature review revealed the strong evidence that youth aged 16 to 25 years (World Health Organisation, 1989) in many jurisdictions world-wide report experiencing significant harmful impacts arising from gambling. The exact nature and prevalence of these impacts and the processes that underlie their origins remain obscure in part because of the common assumption that measures and criteria developed with adult populations may be applied to youth. Therefore, the approach adopted in this doctoral sequence of empirical studies was to focus on the core addictive construct of self-control (Heather, Miller and Greeley, 1991) using in the first instance a qualitative data analysis of 34 youth who gambled regularly at least once per week. The main cognitive themes from the interviews were used to develop a Limit Maintenance Model which outlined five qualitatively different approaches to the control of gambling. With certain aims in mind, three empirical studies provided a mixed-methods approach to identifying the cognitive, emotional and developmental barriers to self-control of gambling. In so doing, they emphasized the imperative for youth to embark on a learning process to ensure their self-regulatory skills are sufficiently developed to manage the temptation to gamble to excess, and instead, maintain self-controlled and safe gambling behaviours