Dr. Richard Velleman

We're not saying everybody's going to become a gambler, like everybody's not going to become a drinker.

But the likelihood is greater if there's somebody in your family or friendship group.

That's the one bit.

The other bit is that actually...

your family and friends in lots of contexts can be a protective factor as well.

And what we discovered in this research was that friendships are not protected.

So if you've got a group of friends and some gamble and some don't, and you're close with some people and so on, having close friendships who aren't gamblers doesn't protect you from becoming a gambler if you've got a close friend who's a gambler.

But having close relationships, close positive relationships in the family does protect you.

Even if there's a gambler in the family, let's say it's your brother, you're more likely not to be, quotes, infected by the gambling if you've got a good relationship with your sister or your other brother or your parents and so on.

So close family relationships protect you even though you're more at risk by hanging around with gamblers, whether it's family and friends or whatever.

To be honest, I don't know.

I don't know why our results have shown that friendships, no matter how good or close your friendships are, they're not generally protective in the way that close family relationships are.

Just send me a word about how we did this because people are going to think, how do they know all this stuff?

Sure, yeah.

We actually did a longitudinal study, which meant that we went to people eight different times.

So every six months, we did some very detailed interviewing work with people over a four-year period.

So we could see the progression.

We could see what the...

who had good and bad relationships with different people at the time one, and then we had time two, time three, all the way up to time eight.

So we could actually measure whether one thing seemed to cause another thing or something else seemed to be protective for another thing.