Dr. Crystal Fulton:

As part of our research design, we started working with addiction service providers. We spoke to people in ten different organisations and then conducted a snowball sample. We put out a call for people who wanted to talk to us about gambling. They could have come to us if they wanted to just talk about gambling. Every gambler who came to us was at a different stage of recovery. It was a matched pair design so they needed to nominate a family member to participate. It is such an isolating activity that our volunteers do not always have such a person, because that family might be gone, so they could bring a friend. We interviewed both so, in the end, we had 22 recovering gamblers matched with 22 people who interviewed alongside them as family and friends.