ReviewJournal of gambling studies2026
Deconstructing Methodological Paradigms in Adolescent Gambling Research: a Critical Analysis and Future Directions.
Review in Journal of gambling studies, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Four years after Delfabbro & King's (2021) foundational critique, adolescent gambling research continues to struggle with fundamental validity questions. Through a critical narrative review synthesizing literature from 2022 to 2025, we evaluate the field's progress in addressing their core contentions regarding measurement validity, causal inference, and longitudinal evidence. Our analysis reveals persistent epistemological tensions between epidemiological and developmental approaches. The review identifies a validity problem in adolescent gambling assessment: instruments adapted from adult populations fail to account for developmental context, producing prevalence estimates that risk pathologizing transient, age-normative experimentation rather than clinically significant harm. It further documents the problematic conflation of correlational evidence with causal inference in gateway hypothesis research. In response, we propose the Dynamic Harm Assessment Framework, which differs from existing models by focusing on how gambling actually disrupts a young person's daily life, measuring harm against what is realistic at their stage of development, and tracking how gambling behaviour changes over time at the individual level. This shift is necessary for distinguishing transient adolescent experimentation from stable high-risk trajectories, and for targeting clinical resources with greater precision.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.