Social and Economic Impact of Gambling (SEIG) Research

Diverse individuals and organizations, including the Manitoba Gaming Control Commission (MGCC), have had a long-standing interest in identifying and measuring the positive and negative consequences of gambling. Since the late 1990s, the MGCC has partnered with agencies and groups in other provinces to further research capacity in this regard. Significant progress was signaled in 2004 when the MGCC partnered with regulatory, research and treatment organizations from across the country to develop a framework for measuring gambling’s social and economic impact. This research partnership is now chaired by the MGCC and called the Canadian Consortium for Gambling Research (CCGR).

As a result of this partnership, the SEIG Framework was developed and released by the CCGR in 2008. This framework reflects the interdisciplinary and complex nature of impact research and provides a map of indicators, based on six themes, upon which to assess the gambling’s impact consistently, objectively and from multiple perspectives. The framework was developed with expert input from a panel of internationally-renowned, multidisciplinary researchers.

The MGCC recently used the SEIG Framework to prepare the report, Challenges of Assessing Social and Economic Impact: Profiling First Nations Casinos in Manitoba (2011).  Those familiar with the framework will recognize that the MGCC’s project faced similar challenges to those articulated by other researchers using the SEIG Framework. That is, the scope of the MGCC’s study was hampered by the lack of existing methodologies for collecting valid data on several indicators and the inability to make attributions and comparisons about many indicators even if the data were collected.  For example, a lot of existing data is financial or numerical, including revenues and employment figures; this makes it difficult to compare these impacts to non-financial and non-numerical indicators, like many measures of health and wellbeing.   

Until the state of this field of research matures further, the MGCC will not continue to conduct independent SEIG research. Nevertheless, the MGCC remains committed to furthering SEIG research and will continue to work with the CCGR to refine and advance the SEIG Framework. The CCGR recently released a commissioned review of nearly 500 SEIG-related studies, called The Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling (2011) . The review proposes a series of best practices for impact analyses and concludes that assessing gambling’s overall impact will always involve subjective judgment.

Please click on the links below for the MGCC's study and for recent CCGR documents. Please visit the CCGR website for more information and resources from the CCGR's SEIG initiatives.

Links:

• Challenges of Assessing Social and Economic Impact: Profiling First Nations Casinos in Manitoba (2011)

• Canadian Consortium for Gambling Research:
  • The Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling (2011)
  • The Socio-Economic Impact of Gambling (SEIG) Framework (2008)