Lottery Gambling and Socioeconomic Status

Lottery gambling is a popular pastime that can result in harmful addiction. Lottery games may not have the same addictive potential as casino or race track bets, but the habit of purchasing tickets and allowing this behavior to control one’s life can lead to an unhealthy dependence on the hope for winning. While purchasing a lottery ticket now and then may not harm one’s health, an increased frequency of purchases can turn this activity into a destructive habit that could negatively impact their financial and personal lives.

Government-operated lotteries are common throughout the world, including every Canadian province, 45 U.S. states, and all the inhabited Caribbean islands. Lottery games range from scratch-off tickets and lotto to keno and video lottery terminals. Although people from all walks of life play the lottery, some individuals are more prone to pathological gambling than others. This is often attributed to the illusion of control – the false belief that a person’s choices can influence outcomes that are mostly left to chance. For example, anyone who has ever purchased a lottery ticket and felt they were a hair’s breadth away from winning has fallen victim to this illusion of control.

Previous studies have found that socioeconomic status and neighborhood disadvantage are related to lottery gambling. The current study examined a longitudinal dataset of two comparable national surveys and conducted multivariate analysis on relationships between gambling and selected sociodemographic variables, age, gender, race/ethnicity and the census-based variable, neighborhood disadvantage. The results indicated that the higher a respondent’s level of socioeconomic status, the more likely they were to gamble on the lottery. However, the effect of SES disappeared when neighborhood disadvantage (squared) was included in the analysis.