Partially supported by a NULab Seedling Grant.
In 2018, the US Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PAPSA), which prevented states from authorizing legal sports betting. During the next five years, 37 US states passed legislation to legalize sports betting, with 81% permitting the operation of online sports betting (OSB). The scientific community is only beginning to study the public health implications of the rapidly changing sports betting landscape. For example, recent reports suggest that gambling disorder (GD), an addictive condition recognized by the DSM-V, is on the rise among young adults who bet on sports. Developing and implementing interventions to minimize the harms associated with sports betting is further complicated by the fact that recent policy changes and the rise of OSB are altering the environment in which bets can be placed. Unlike traditional forms of gambling, OSB websites and phone apps allow people to engage in the activity at home and in social isolation. We aim to address these research gaps by considering how people who engage in sports betting discuss topics related to GD by applying novel techniques from computational text analysis and social network analysis to original data from recreational gambling forums on the social media website Reddit.
To better understand whether recreational sports betting forums normalize risky gambling behaviors or create safety nets that encourage responsible gambling practices, we plan to use original data collected from two subreddits, r/sportsbetting and r/sportsbook. While the primary purpose of these forums is to facilitate discussions about betting strategies, users also engage with these platforms by posting comments about their personal experiences with GD and sharing their observations and opinions about risky sports betting behaviors. To capture these conversations, we scraped 194 conversational threads, or organized collections of 7,566 Reddit comments published between January 2012 and May 2024 that contain key phrases related to GD (e.g., “addicted,” “problematic”).
Next, we plan to apply state-of-the-art methods from machine learning, text analysis, and social network analysis. First, we plan to quantify the topics, themes, and sentiments that arise across our sample of Reddit comments through a combination of hand coding and computational text analyses (e.g., BERTopic modeling, sentiment analysis). Then, we will construct user-based networks for each Reddit thread where the individuals of interest, or actors, are users with Reddit accounts who are linked by directed ties, or edges, that indicate whether one user responded to another’s comment in a thread of interest. To understand how the content and sentiment of users’ comments shape the network structure of conversations across Reddit threads, we will apply exponential random graph models (ERGMs) and advanced meta-analysis techniques. Results from this proposed work will carry the potential to inform practitioners’ understandings of how online recreational sports betting forums can both assist and inhibit people’s efforts to seek help for GD, as well as improve services for GD recovery.
Project Team:
- Cassie McMillan, Assistant Professor, Sociology & Criminology, Principal Instigator
- Daniel Trovato, PhD Student, Criminology & Criminal Justice, Research Assistant
- Sai Tummala, Undergraduate Student, Research Assistant
- Gaby D’Souza, Undergraduate Student, Research Assistant
Presentations:
McMillan, Cassie and Sara Francisco, “A Bunch of Degenerates: An Exploration of Online Discourse about Problematic Sports Betting through Social Network Analysis.” INSNA Sunbelt, Paris, France.
