Sports gambling among youths: The role of demographic factors and prevalence

Abstract

Sports’ betting is the most popular form of gambling among youths and it has strong appeal across classes, gender, sexuality, races and other social categorization. This study, therefore examined sports betting prevalence and its relationship with demographic variables of gender, age, education level and income level among youths in Ilorin, Kwara State, North Central, Nigeria. Cross-sectional survey research design was adopted for the research; the population of the study was all 339,225 youths from the three local government area of Ilorin, Kwara State. Multistage random sampling technique was used to select 470 youths. The instrument for data collection was a researcher-designed questionnaire, validated by experts and the reliability coefficient was .70. Frequency and percentage were used for answering the research questions, while logistic regression was used to test the null hypotheses at .05 level of significance. The findings of the study indicated that higher proportion of youths with monthly income (69.5%) reported engaging in sports betting, likewise, higher proportion of youths with no formal education (69.2%) reported engaging in sports betting more than other categories and there was high proportion of youths (58.7%) that engage in sports betting. Furthermore, the demographic factors of age (OR = 1.67; p = .12), education (OR = 0.37; p = .23), and monthly income (OR = 1.22; p = .51) were not significantly associated with sports betting among youths, since the p-value is greater than .05 level of significance. It was concluded that monthly income was not a predictor of sports betting among youths. Furthermore, age and education level were not significant predictor of sports betting among youths. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that public health educators should embark on an informative campaign to reduce the degree to which youths overrate sports betting as an avenue for money making.