preview

Quinte Longitudinal Study (QLS)

Decent Essays

Method
Participants
The current analysis included 4121 individuals whose data was collected via the Quinte Longitudinal Study (QLS) over a period of five years (2006-2011) (Williams et al., 2015). The QLS gained ethics approval from the Human Subject Research Committee at the University of Lethbridge and was conducted with the purpose of furthering research and understanding on problem gambling and other behavioural addictions. The authors of this paper were given permission to conduct the current analyses from all those involved in the QLS. Essential demographic information is presented in Table 1.
Individuals were considered eligible for the study if they lived within a 70 kilometre radius of the city of Belleville. Random digit dialing, …show more content…

Check off any that apply’). At time one individuals were given the options of reporting up to six different behavioural addictions, these included: sex or pornography, exercise, shopping, Internet chat lines, video or Internet gaming, and other. At time two, excessive eating was added as a behavioural addiction because it was a recurrent response for the ‘option’ …show more content…

The measure includes 21 items which make up three different sub categories: psychosocial problems caused by the behavior (13 items; e.g., interpersonal or financial difficulties), im- paired control (3 items; spending more time or money on the activity than intended, intention to cut down or quit), and other addiction-related characteristics (5 items; e.g., craving, preoccupation). A higher score on this measure indicates a more severe behavioural addiction, and vice versa. Internal consistency for the scale varied depending on the year and the specific behaviours but consistently demonstrated high values ranging from .77 to .92.
Two questions were administered to determine the specific help seeking behaviour associated with a problematic behaviour, these included: ‘Have you ever sought help for these problems? (yes/no)’ and ‘Where did you seek help from?’ (friends, family, family doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, counseling service, pastor/minister/priest, and telephone

Get Access