S02-02 - Did Video Kill the Radio Star? - Assessing Gambling and Multimedia Use in Luxembourg's High School Students

Abstract

For years, addiction prevention was centered on substance abuse. This focus has shifted recently, especially in regard to children and teenagers, with a growing concern on potentially knotty behaviors, namely gambling and computer, Internet or video game abuse. With the recent soar and availability of the new technologies, it is however extremely difficult to assess which kind of behavioral patterns can be considered as normal, or not, in the contemporary teenage population. To gather benchmark results, we therefore initiated two nationwide surveys, reaching all the students enrolled in the public or private high schools in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

The first survey aims at assessing the frequency and modalities of gambling in Luxembourg's high school students. These data will be especially relevant for the pending legislative discussions whether the national gambling regulations should include a paragraph about the protection of minors or not.

The second survey aims at assessing multimedia use by Luxembourg's high school students. These questions not only inquire the accessibility to various technologies, but also try to depict teenagers’ daily behavior and use of the available technologies. The main objective of this survey is to assess to which extend the technologies are used in different tasks (i.e. work, communication, leisure), but also to appraise whether this population has pleasing access to the current media.