Online Gambling Up Among Young Americans

A recent study has found that American high school females and college-aged males are increasingly gambling online, despite the implementation of UIGEA, which was designed to prevent Internet gambling by cutting off the flow of money to online gambling sites.

According to the National Annenberg Survey of Youth, 16% of college-aged males reported having gambled online on a monthly basis, a big increase from the 4.4% who reported such activity back in 2008. Similarly, high school-aged females tripled their use of online gambling sites since 2008, as 1.5% reported using them on a monthly basis compared to the 0.5% who said they did so in the last survey. High school-aged males also showed an increase (2.7% to 6.2%), but given the size of the survey, this was not considered statistically significant.

However, these results do not suggest that gambling is on the rise for young Americans overall. When considering both online and offline gambling, the monthly and weekly rates of gambling dropped for both high school- and college-aged males when compared to the 2008 survey, and remained about the same for college-aged females. The only group showing an increase in overall gambling activity was high school females, though they were still less likely to gamble than their male peers.

The survey, conducted by the Annenberg Adolescent Communication Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, was a national telephone poll of Americans aged 14 through 22. The 2008 survey had 835 respondents, while the 2010 edition included 596 respondents.

Since the overall gambling numbers did not suggest any real increase in gambling from young Americans, the biggest takeaway from the survey may have been that online gambling continues to increase despite efforts to delegitimize the practice by the US Government.

"The dramatic increase in use of online gambling by college-aged male youth indicates that payment restrictions on such sites are no longer a barrier to young people," said Institute director Dan Romer.