This research project seeks to improve understandings of gambling within domestic contexts. The Principal Investigator is working in collaboration with Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University to collate a major new body of qualitative data into gambling and family life in the UK. The objectives of the research are fourfold: to produce a socio-cultural analysis of gambling which moves beyond conventional psychological and economic approaches to examine the role of the household in mediating and facilitating gambling to work in collaboration with Mass Observation Archive (MOA) to develop a major new directive on the theme of gambling to contribute a major new qualitative dataset on gambling and households and communicate this to other key stakeholders.

One of the key aims of this research was to adopt a methodology which would mark a departure and offer an alternative to the existing dominance of psychological and economic accounts of gambling pathologies. In addition, it was hoped that the methodological choices adopted would help to address the broad neglect of the home as space for the negotiation of gambling practice. To this end, a deeply qualitative method was adopted that would mark a shift away from positivist methodologies of gambling and towards an approach which would illuminate the richness and complexities of gambling experience and also offer a complex, detailed understanding of domestic, at home, intimate routines and rituals of gambling. The research project produced the first Directive on gambling – entitled ‘Gambling and Households’ to be commissioned by Mass Observation Project. As an anonymous, confidential method which specialises in collating detailed, personal records of everyday life, Mass Observation is ideally placed to elucidate complex data about a taboo and morally sensitive topic such as gambling. A ‘mail out’ containing the Directive was sent out to all 500 regular Mass Observation writers – or ‘observers’ – and we received 214 responses of which 143 were from women and 71 from men. We regard this high response rate as one of the great successes of the project. Observers were provided with a set of questions to guide their responses which could be answered in as much detail as they liked. The PI worked closely with Kirsty Pattrick and Jessica Scantlebury, Project Officers at Mass Observation Project to ensure that the questions on the Directive were clear, concise and simple to respond to. Observers were asked questions about personal experiences and memories of gambling and also specifically about routines of gambling and patterns of expenditure. Observers were also asked to comment on their particular feelings about money in relation to gambling including daydreams about winning money and also thoughts about others who had won money. Observers were extremely generous in their responses and in the detail provided; some responses were over ten sides of A4 in length. The resulting dataset was thus highly complex and analysis very time consuming. Replies were read for common themes and Glaser and Strauss’s (1968) ‘theoretical sampling’ model was used to categorise, code and theorise the data as detailed in the next section. In terms of methodology, this analytical approach marked a departure from the hypothesis testing model which has often dominated gambling research.