Do You Live With a Problem Gambler? Test

People who share a home with someone whose gambling affects money, trust, or stability may use this assessment to organize what they have been noticing about problem gambling in the household. The items address how gambling-related disruption alters routines, responsibilities, money, and relationships. The Do You Live With a Problem Gambler? Test focuses on the other person’s gambling-related behavior and its impact on the respondent, helping clarify whether patterns deserve attention.

What This Assessment Explores

This questionnaire is for a partner, relative, or household member affected by someone else’s gambling. The respondent’s experiences provide context, while the scale reads signs of gambling disorder in the household member.

Living With a Problem Gambler: 0–20 assesses those signs. Low indication (0–3) may indicate isolated gambling-related problems; Borderline/moderate (4–7) suggests a level between social and problem gambling; High indication (8–20) indicates pronounced gambling disorder in the household member with possible emotional dependence in the respondent.

The items cover four situations:

• Financial disruption shows unpaid bills, borrowing, debt, and protected essentials.
• Gambling behavior captures absences, workplace gambling, chasing losses, and broken promises.
• Secrecy and trust reflect lies, concealment, and money checking.
• Relationship strain indicates the family effects of problem gambling through mood changes, guilt, control, and thoughts of leaving.

Methodology and Evidence Base

Each item asks the respondent to mark Yes or No about an event, behavior, or consequence. The result is one overall score, but the questionnaire does not state how answers are weighted or whether reverse scoring is used. It is a structured reflection with an undocumented scoring algorithm.

Its wording is conceptually consistent with the Gam-Anon 20 Questions, covering money problems, secrecy, chasing losses, mood changes, and family strain. Thematic overlap reflects issues encountered when there are gambling problems in a household; it does not establish an instrument relationship or show that this questionnaire adapts or reproduces the checklist. No norms, reliability estimates, or clinical cutoffs are stated for this online version.

Dowling, Suomi, Jackson, and Lavis’s 2016 family-impact study examines financial, responsibility-related, and psychosocial effects. Lesieur and Custer’s 1984 work describes escalation, losses, desperation, and disruption across family and finances. These sources support the focus but do not determine how this online questionnaire should be scored.

Conflict, memory, privacy, and disclosure can shape self-report. The score describes the reported pattern; interpret it alongside the situations behind the answers, not as a diagnosis.