Master’s Thesis Title: Risk Factors for Problem Gambling among College and University Baseball Student-Athletes by Tim Mowrer (2015).
In my role as thesis research advisor I assisted Tim Mowrer, a student in the Sport Management master’s degree program in conceptualizing and fleshing-out research questions for his thesis research in addition to helping to refine the experimental design and statistical analysis approaches. This work also included obtaining IRB approvals, scheduling the public defense presentation, and creating opportunities for the student to share his research findings with broader audiences.
The purpose of Tim’s study was to investigate gambling behaviors in baseball, specifically, the prevalence of negative gambling behaviors among collegiate baseball players, and whether a video educational intervention experiment using a randomized controlled trial with a pretest-posttest design would be successful in altering gambling attitudes and behaviors. Subjects for the study were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups with the total number of subjects distributed as equally as possible.
The South Oaks Gambling Screen was used to examine gambling tendencies and to test for problem gambling and disordered gambling behaviors. Additionally, several questions regarding participants’ readiness to change via the Transtheoretical Model were developed. Twenty-four additional questionnaire items were developed to gauge subjects’ knowledge of NCAA gambling rules, gambling histories, and attitudes towards gambling. The Mann-Whitney U test and Friedman tests were used to determine significant differences between groups.
Findings reveal that baseball student-athletes participate in a variety of gambling activities, with statistically significant differences between groups (p=<.05) on the pretest and posttest for six survey questions, suggesting that the video intervention administered to the experimental group was moderately successful in altering student-athletes’ attitudes towards gambling.
As part of this faculty-student collaborative research, I coordinated an interview/meeting between Tim Mowrer and Ms. Jean Gerdes, Gambling Prevention Specialist from the wellness agency Compass Mark that took place in November 2014. Through this meeting, Tim was later selected to serve as an expert panelist for the Compass Mark Problem Gambling Awareness Month panel where he presented preliminary findings and answered questions about his research to an audience of approximately 50 people held at the IU 13 in Lancaster, PA. March 27, 2015. Several weeks later on April 23, 2015, he presented summary results to approximately 40 students and four faculty members in attendance at his breakout session of the Student Research Conference: Made in Millersville.
