SBIRT Toolkit
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# Problem and Pathological Gambling Measure (PPGM)

 
Yes
No
  1. a) Has your involvement in gambling caused you either to borrow a significant amount of money or sell some of your possessions in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. b) Has your involvement in gambling caused significant financial concerns for you or someone close to you in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. Has your involvement in gambling caused significant mental stress in the form of guilt, anxiety, or depression for you or someone close to you in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. a) Has your involvement in gambling caused serious problems in your relationship with your spouse/partner, or important friends or family in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. b) Has your involvement in gambling caused you to repeatedly neglect your children or family in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. Has your involvement in gambling resulted in significant health problems or injury for you or someone close to you in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. a) Has your involvement in gambling caused significant work or school problems for you or someone close to you in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. b) Has your involvement in gambling caused you to miss a significant amount of time off work or school in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. Has your involvement in gambling caused you or someone close to you to write bad cheques, take money that didn't belong to you or commit other illegal acts to support your gambling in the past 12 months?
Yes
No
  1. Is there anyone else who would say that your involvement in gambling in the past 12 months has caused any significant problems regardless of whether you agree with them or not?
Yes
No
  1. In the past 12 months, have you often gambled longer, with more money or more frequently than you intended to?
Yes
No
  1. In the past 12 months, have you often gone back to try and win back the money you lost?
Yes
No
  1. a) In the past 12 months, have you made any attempts to either cut down, control or stop your gambling?
Yes
No
  1. b) Were you successful in these attempts?
Yes
No
  1. In the past 12 months, is there anyone else who would say that you have had a difficulty controlling your gambling, regardless of whether you agreed with them or not?
Yes
No
  1. In the past 12 months, would you say you have been preoccupied with gambling?
Yes
No
  1. In the past 12 months, when you were not gambling did you often experience irritability, restlessness or strong cravings for it?
Yes
No
  1. In the past 12 months, did you find you needed to gamble with larger and larger amounts of money to achieve the same level of excitement?
Yes
No

About the measure

Create a score by adding up the values of each item:

  • 0 indicates no risk/non-problem gambling
  • 1 indicates at-risk
  • 2-4 indicates problem
  • ≥5 indicates pathological gambling

For more detailed scoring instructions, see PPGM Extended.

Measure Characteristics

  • Sensitivity = 0.99
  • Specificity = 0.99
  • Positive predictive value = 0.94
  • Negative predictive value = 0.99

The PPGM's high accuracy in both research and clinical settings makes it a great measure for differentiating between levels of problem gambling.

  • A sensitivity of 99 per cent suggests that the PPGM detects 99 per cent of people with problem gambling (true positives) but that one per cent go undetected (false negatives).
  • A specificity of 99 per cent suggests that the PPGM correctly reports 99 per cent of people without problem gambling as negative (true negatives) but that one per cent without problem gambling are incorrectly identified as positive (false positives).
  • A positive predictive value of 0.94 suggests that 94 per cent of people who screen positive on the PPGM will be identified as a problem gambler.
  • A negative predictive value of .99 suggests that 99 per cent of people who screen negative on the PPGM will be correctly identified as a non-problem gambler.

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