No description available.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--The University of Regina (Canada), 1999. / Adviser: Douglas Durst. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McGill University (Canada), 2002. / Adviser: Robert Bracewell. Includes bibliographical references.

The present study examined developmental and gender differences in youths' attitudes toward gambling. Phase I of the study involved a quantitative analysis of gambling attitudes among 1408 students from Elementary and Secondary Schools. Participants ranging from 8 to 20 years of age completed the Attitudes and Gambling Activities Questionnaire (AGAQ) and scaled questions designed to delineate the perceived degree of skill and luck involved in various gambling activities. The frequency and reasons youth engage in specific gambling activities and explored attitudes and their relationship to perceptions of perceived control over gambling outcomes. Results revealed age and gender related attitudes toward gambling that may increase their vulnerability to developing problem gambling were examined. Older youth expressed more tolerance of gambling activities while young children under-estimated the addictive nature of gambling and over-estimated the degree of control over gambling outcomes. Males expressed being less fearful of getting caught gambling and had much more tolerant attitudes toward gambling behaviors. Furthermore, those youth found to have a greater number of permissive and/or irresponsible attitudes also had greater misperceptions concerning the degree of skill involved in gambling. Phase II of the study elaborated upon quantitative findings through focus group analysis involving 59 participants in grades 4, 7, 9 and 11. Results expanded upon findings regarding youths' perceptions of gambling and attitudes towards gambling at school, and outline youths' understanding of responsible gambling. Findings are discussed in terms of their utility for youth problem gambling prevention programming and future directions for research are suggested.

The present study examined the relationship between several risk and protective variables associated with problem gambling, substance abuse, and other multiple risk-taking activities by adolescents. With the goal of identifying protective factors that prevent youth from escalating from social gambling to serious problem gambling, this research examined the relationship between family cohesion, school connectedness, coping and adaptive behaviours, mentor relationships, achievement motivation, involvement in conventional organizations, and the development of three health-compromising outcomes---youth problem gambling, substance abuse, and involvement in multiple risk-taking behaviours (e.g., smoking, unsafe sexual activity, and reckless driving). The sample consisted of 2,179 students, ages 11 to 19, in the Province of Ontario. Family and school connectedness were associated with decreased involvement in excessive gambling, substance use, and multiple risk-taking activities. Furthermore, an examination of the effect of potential protective factors on a set of risk factors predictive of adolescent problem gambling suggested that family cohesion plays a role in the prediction of probable pathological gamblers and those at risk for developing a gambling problem. These findings were interpreted with respect to their implications for the development and implementation of prevention programs.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University (Canada), 2000. / Adviser: Rina Gupta. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trinity Western University (Canada), 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Psy. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-101).

This research is aimed at unraveling the institutional representations of gamblers’ identities in the postmodern era. Although gambling has been widely researched in many fields such as psychology, sociology and cultural studies (e.g., Cosgrave, 2006; Kingma, 2010; McMillen, 1996; Petry, 2005), there has been a lack of scholarly inquiry vis-à-vis this topic among language researchers including discourse analysts. With the recent inauguration of two casino-based holiday resorts, Singapore provides a suitable platform for carrying out gambling-related academic research. Adopting the approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study focuses on how gamblers’ identities are constructed through discourse as an artifact by social institutions. To this end, the present research capitalizes on the Bakhtinian (1981) notion of “dialogism” and makes use of multiple data sets in which different institutional “voices” are embedded. The data consist of newspaper forum letters, gamblers’ monologues released by a state gambling regulatory agency, and materials on problem/pathological gambling published by medical professionals. As a “public sphere” (Habermas, 1989) where a variety of “voices” about gamblers and gambling are accommodated, the newspaper forum letters serve as an opening scene for data analysis. From the 47 letters collected, three main groups of writers—(i) the non-affiliated contributors; (ii) the governing parties; (iii) the mental health-care professionals—have been identified. Adhering to the framework of Fairclough (2003), the analysis centers around the linguistic triggers for three social research issues: (i) legitimation; (ii) hegemony (aka “equivalence and difference”); (iii) “appearance versus reality.” It has been found that the non-affiliated contributors make heavy use of legitimation strategies. By contrast, legitimation strategies are much less prevalent among the governing parties. As for the mental health-care professionals, legitimation strategies are frequently found in their letters as a medium to foreground their in-group knowledge or expertise. To further investigate the government’s “voice,” a nationwide campaign initiated by the Singapore National Council on Problem Gambling has been used for analysis. Four gamblers’ speeches presented in this campaign have been examined on the basis of process types (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005) and code choice. The findings show that the juxtaposed identities between the social gamblers and the recovering problem gamblers are symbolically mobilized by the state to create the stigmatized quality of “problematic gamblers” for the purpose of public governance. The interrogation of the medical “voice” has been performed along the direction of knowledge “recontextualization” (Kong, 2009; Linell, 2009). The data analysis involves texts from three sources: (i) a clinical handbook; (ii) a complimentary leaflet of a mental health-care unit; (iii) a self-help book from a popular profit-making series. The sociocognitive approach to discourse developed by van Dijk (1995, 2003b, 2005a, 2006, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2011, 2012) has been chosen as the principal analytic framework for this data set. The findings indicate that the text producers are continuously fiddling the boundaries between different types of knowledge (e.g., technical knowledge and “general-sociocultural” knowledge) with the goal of not only “popularizing” the medical paradigm, but also “colonizing” the “lifeworld” (Habermas, 1987). The significance of the research is primarily three-fold. First, bearing the undertone of deconstruction (Derrida, 1978), the current discourse-oriented inquiry about gamblers’ identities is an exemplar of how text and its ideological-cum-social implications are critically untangled and re-questioned. Second, the research offers concrete linguistic evidence on the essential complementary ontological presence of institutional power holders and the “docile bodies” (Foucault, 1977) for societal functioning and the maintenance of social stability. Third, a procedure for studying gamblers’ identities (or other institutional discursive constructs) is devised. With CDA as the overarching constituent, analytical concepts from a range of scholars are incorporated into the study (e.g., Fairclough, 2003; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Hyland, 2005; Jeffries, 2010a, 2010b; Kong, 2009; Martin & White, 2005; van Dijk, 2008a; van Leeuwen, 2008).