Beneficial or harmful? Finns’ perceptions of the consequences of their gambling on relationships, health, and finances

Gambling can result in benefits and harm, yet their relationship and underlying predictors remain inadequately understood. Using data from the Finnish Gambling 2023 population survey (N = 5,977), this study examines to what extent Finnish gamblers self-report gambling as beneficial or harmful. We examined associations between sociodemographic and gambling behavior-related variables and harms and benefits across three domains: relationships, health, and finance. Binary logistic regression models were used. The majority of respondents evaluated their gambling as having neither benefits nor harms for health (93.1%), finances (85.2%), and relationships (90.8%), respectively. While examining the extremes of the rating scale, 10.2% rated their gambling financially harmful while 4.6% perceived it as beneficial. Conversely, from the perspective of health and, particularly, relationships, gambling was rated more beneficial than harmful. Deviations from neutrality, positive and negative, were most common among those with frequent and at-risk gambling based on Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI) scores. Findings suggest that experiencing benefits from gambling is associated with experiencing harms and having higher PGSI scores. Although these findings describe co-occurring self-reported evaluations rather than directional or causal relationships, our results support the view that gambling is an atypical consumer product, inherently risky even when perceived as beneficial to the individual.