In the latest online gambling surveys conducted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, monthly gamblers in Massachusetts reported ongoing higher levels of sports betting, gambling intensity and gambling harms, with their attitudes toward gambling continuing to be more negative.
The most recent surveys were conducted in the spring and fall of 2024 and reveal some of the initial social impacts of legalized sports betting in Massachusetts, which was rolled out in the first three months of 2023. The new findings were compared to those from annual surveys in 2022 and 2023.
The trends can't be generalized to the overall population, but they give the Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling in Massachusetts ( SEIGMA ) research team at UMass Amherst a picture of changing behaviors and attitudes over time among people who gamble monthly or more frequently.
A report on the surveys was presented today, July 31, to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission by gambling behavior expert Rachel Volberg , SEIGMA's principal investigator and research professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences .
"Research such as this Trend Report provides the Commission and the public with important surveillance information," said MGC Chair Jordan Maynard. "The results of this report will assist the Commission as we make policy and draft regulations to provide Massachusetts residents with a legal gaming landscape that promotes responsible gaming and consumer protections."
Volberg provided commissioners with a snapshot, or executive summary, to capture highlights of the research.
"The first thing that jumped out at us were the attitudes toward gambling," Volberg said.
"Between 2022 and 2023, we saw a decline in the proportion of monthly gamblers who believed that all types of gambling should be legal and a small increase in the proportion who believed that all types of gambling should be illegal."
Those trends were maintained in the 2024 surveys, with slight increases in both those measures. In addition, the proportion of monthly gamblers who believed that gambling harm outweighs the benefits rose from 48% in 2022 to 53% in 2023 and the spring of 2024 and then to 56% in the fall of 2024.
Volberg attributes the rise in negative attitudes to the intense media coverage and marketing push that began in 2022, a year before legal sports betting in Massachusetts took effect, and continues. "My sense is that, as we saw with the introduction of casinos, the hype in the media seems to drive people's attitudes quite a bit," Volberg said.
The publicity surrounding sports betting seemed to influence behaviors, as well as attitudes. Before drilling down to monthly gamblers, the researchers looked at sports betting among all the participants in the online panels in 2024 since that form of betting had just been legalized in the commonwealth.
Past-year participation in sports betting among all those surveyed rose from 16.7% in March 2022, before sports betting was legalized, to 26.9% in March 2023, just as the online and mobile sportsbooks began operating. Participation rose to 32.6% in the two surveys in 2024.
The proportion of monthly gamblers who responded "never" to betting on sports declined from 61.4% in 2022, when sports betting was still illegal, to 46.7% in the fall of 2024. Among monthly gamblers, weekly and monthly sports betting rose from 18.9% and 12.8% respectively in 2022 to 26.3% and 19.2% respectively in the fall of 2024.
"Another interesting change was a decline in the rate of social sports betting [from 49.3% in 2022 to 32.2% in the fall of 2024] and a rise in betting with legal sports books in Massachusetts," Volberg said. "That was further confirmed by the decline in the rate of monthly gamblers participating in illegal sports betting exclusively," from 13.5% in 2022 to 6.8% in 2023 and rising slightly to 8.3% in the fall of 2024.
Among monthly gamblers in the online surveys, those experiencing gambling problems jumped from 20.9% in 2022 to 25.6% in 2023 and to 28% in the fall of 2024. A similar rise in problem gambling among monthly gamblers was reported following the introduction of casinos.
A higher rate of gambling harms also was reported by monthly gamblers in the 2024 surveys, especially in the areas of financial harms (from 18% in 2022 to 25% in the fall of 2024) and family or relationships (from 13.9% to 27.2%).
The report concludes that harm reduction strategies targeting sports bettors are needed, as is an expansion of responsible gambling tools to support individuals reporting financial and/or family or relationship harms.
"These indicators from the monthly gamblers in the online panels are not going in the right direction, which is definitely a concern when considering the impacts of legalized sports betting on the population at large," Volberg said.
Mark Vander Linden, MGC's director of research and responsible gaming, agreed.
"The rise in problem gambling prevalence among monthly gamblers is notable," he said, "and the Commission will continue to support measures aimed at reducing harms."
