Comparing undergraduate and community-recruited adult non-gamblers' motives for not gambling: Do they differ?

- Research focusing on non-gamblers may have utility for identifying protective factors against gambling disorder.
- Previous research has identified why young adults abstain from gambling, but these findings may not generalize.
- This study collected reasons for not gambling from a community-recruited sample of non-gamblers.
- Lifetime non-gamblers provided motives for not gambling that are similar to those found in young adults.
- Community non-gamblers emphasize financial risk and place less importance on social influence as reasons to abstain.

The field of gambling studies has extensively focused on isolating risk factors for developing a gambling disorder. Conversely, little attention has been paid to identifying protective factors against gambling disorder among people who choose to not gamble at all. Moreover, the limited number of studies that have focused on non-gamblers have neglected to differentiate current from lifetime non-gamblers. The purpose of the present study was to examine motives for not gambling among a diverse sample of adult lifetime non-gamblers recruited from the community and to compare these motives to an undergraduate student sample of non-gamblers from a previous study. Participants consisted of 219 lifetime non-gamblers (45.2% male) from the United States recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The previously recruited sample consisted of Canadian undergraduate students (n = 196). Eight distinct categories of motivations for not gambling were identified in the sample of adult community non-gamblers, which corresponded closely with previous findings from the student sample. However, comparisons between the two samples revealed that adult lifetime non-gamblers were more likely to provide financial motives as reasons for not gambling. Whereas, the student sample was more likely to mention disinterest and the influence of others as reasons to avoid gambling. Results suggest that the choice not to gamble among lifetime non-gamblers may reflect a more conscious, values-based decision when compared to undergraduate non-gamblers.