Gambling disorder has serious negative consequences for individual health and wellbeing, while being more prevalent among college student-athletes compared to the general college population. While previous research reports that sexual minority (i.e., gay, lesbian and bisexual) populations have higher rates of addictive behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse, no previous research has explored risk for gambling disorder symptomatology by sexual identity status. The aim of the current study is to identify differences in the severity of gambling disorder symptomatology between sexual minority and heterosexual student-athletes. A stratified random sample of 19,299 National Collegiate Athletic Association college student-athletes participated in an anonymous survey assessing gambling disorder symptomatology. Student-athletes completed measures assessing their past 12-month problem gambling as measured by the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for gambling disorder and provided information on their sexual identity. Gay and bisexual men had disordered gambling scores 3.42 times higher than heterosexual men (p < .01), when adjusting for race/ethnicity, and years in college. Gay/lesbian and bisexual women reported disordered gambling scores 2.57 higher than heterosexual women (p < .01) when adjusting for race/ethnicity and years in college. This is the first study to compare the prevalence of gambling disorder symptomatology across sexual identity status. The higher number of gambling disorder symptoms observed among sexual minorities in the current study underlines the need for more research on this topic, and supports the exploration of intervention efforts designed to better address problem gambling among sexual minority communities.

Student-athletes represent a vulnerable subgroup of the college student population with regards to engagement in high-risk behaviours. Four large samples of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) student-athletes in 2004 (N = 20,587), 2008 (N = 19,942), 2012 (N = 22,935) and 2016 (N = 22,388) were surveyed about their gambling behaviours and attitudes. A cross-sectional study was conducted to gain insight into changing gambling behaviours and attitudes among college student-athletes. Findings revealed gender differences in participation rates of gambling with men consistently engaging in all gambling activities at higher rates than women (55% of men versus 38% women in 2016). Despite gender differences, the results suggest that participation rates for most gambling activities have generally decreased over the twelve-year span. The proportion of student-athletes at-risk or meeting criteria for pathological gambling between 2004 and 2016 has also decreased among men (4% in 2004 versus 2% in 2016) while remaining relatively consistent among women (<1% across all years). Furthermore, attitudes towards various forms of gambling appear to have changed over time, with a greater number of student-athletes in 2016 believing that sports wagering is unacceptable and a potentially harmful activity. Taken together, the results suggest that gambling behaviours among student-athletes may be on a downward trend despite the increased accessibility and availability of gambling opportunities.RésuméEn ce qui concerne la participation à des comportements à risque élevé, les étudiants-athlètes représentent un sous-groupe vulnérable de la population des étudiants universitaires. Quatre grands échantillons d’étudiants-athlètes de la National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), 2004 (N = 20 587), 2008 (N = 19 942), 2012 (N = 22 935) et 2016 (N = 22 388), ont été sondés sur leurs comportements et leurs attitudes de jeu. Une étude transversale a été menée afin de mieux comprendre l’évolution des comportements et des attitudes face au jeu chez les étudiants athlètes. Les résultats ont révélé des différences entre les sexes dans les taux de participation au jeu, les hommes pratiquant systématiquement toutes les activités de jeu à un taux plus élevé que celui des femmes (55 % d’hommes contre 38 % de femmes en 2016). Malgré les différences entre les sexes, les résultats laissent entendre que les taux de participation à la plupart des activités de jeu ont généralement diminué au cours de la période de douze ans. La proportion d’étudiants-athlètes à risque ou satisfaisant aux critères du jeu pathologique entre 2004 et 2016 a également chuté chez les hommes (4 % en 2004 contre 2 % en 2016), tout en restant relativement stable chez les femmes (<1 % pour toutes les années). En outre, les attitudes vis-à-vis des différentes formes de jeu semblent avoir évolué au fil du temps. En 2016, un plus grand nombre d’étudiants-athlètes pensaient que les paris sportifs étaient inacceptables et potentiellement nocifs. Mis ensemble, les résultats suggèrent que les comportements de jeu parmi les étudiants-athlètes pourraient être à la baisse, en dépit de l’accessibilité accrue et de la disponibilité des possibilités de jeu.

Student-athletes represent a vulnerable subgroup of the college student population with regards to engagement in high-risk behaviours, including gambling. Three large samples of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) student-athletes in 2004 (N = 20,587), 2008 (19,942), and 2012 (N = 22,935) were surveyed about their gambling behaviour and attitudes.

Selection of trainees for surgical training is widely acknowledged to be both complex and important. Doctors embarking on surgical careers expend considerable time and resources in training, as do those responsible for facilitating their learning. The aim of surgical training is to prepare surgeons to be competent, effective, ethical practitioners in unsupervised clinical practice as consultant surgeons (Carroll, Kennedy, Traynor & Gallagher, 2009; Elfenbein, Sippel, McDonald, Watson, Scarborough & Migaly, 2015). The aim of selection must be to admit those who are most likely to succeed in surgical training and beyond. Admitting candidates who are inadequately suited to surgical training can result in trainees who unduly struggle or are unable to satisfy training requirements, and may ultimately jeopardise patient safety. In contrast, not accepting candidates who are well-suited to surgical training may be unfair to both candidates and communities that miss out on skillful surgeons. These aspects are among those that make selection to surgical training an extremely ‘highstakes’ activity. Those responsible for selection grapple with assessing candidates’ current skills and attributes, and with ascertaining their likely future performance. Limitations of, and tensions between interacting elements—human agency, requirement specifications, instruments, processes, influences—in selection to surgical training, mean that the long-term outcomes of selection can never be assured. This study identifies principal elements in selection to surgical training, discusses influences on, and interrelationships between the elements, and reviews connections between selection and surgical training assessments. This study has appraised the current instruments used for selection into the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons’ (RACS) General Surgery (GS) training program in Australia and New Zealand, to establish their effectiveness in predicting trainees’ performance in assessments during the first two years of training. Data were considered for selection and assessment items for trainees for three yearly cohorts, selected in 2008, 2009, and 2010. The

The current study sought to identify which diagnostic criteria for gambling disorder have the greatest ability to differentiate between social and problem gamblers. This study was conducted on a sample of male and female college student athletes across the U.S. (n = 8674). Classification and regression tree analysis represents an appropriate technique when addressing the question of an item’s diagnostic value, as it sequentially selects variables to isolate sets of observations with similar outcomes. The current results suggest that the item related to preoccupation (“Have there been periods in the past year where you spent a lot of time thinking about gambling?”) was the DSM-5 item best able to differentiate between male and female social and problem gamblers in this sample. When considering only the nine criteria retained in the DSM-5, three criteria were identified as key for distinguishing between social and disordered gamblers among men, and one criterion was identified for distinguishing between groups of women. In addition, these results do not support the notion that the illegal acts criterion has a particularly low base rate and found that it can be an important indicator of disordered gambling in a college-aged sample.

Drawing on social–cognitive theory, this research examined the impact of college coaches’ ethical and abusive behavior on their athletes’ college choice satisfaction, perceptions of the team’s inclusion climate, and team members’ willingness to cheat. We examined the relative impact of these coaching behaviors controlling for team gender as well as the contextual influences of the profile of the sport, National Collegiate Athletic Association Division, and ethical climate at the school. Results from a multilevel analysis of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s quadrennial Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Learning of Students in College (GOALS) survey (N 19,920 student-athletes) provided general support for our theoretically derived hypotheses. Ethical leadership was positively related to student-athletes’ college choice satisfaction, as well as their perceptions of inclusion climate on the team. Abusive coaching behavior was also positively related to team members’ willingness to cheat. Perceptions of the ethical climate at the school were related to all 3 outcomes. We found only partial support for the relationship between abusive behavior, inclusion climate, and college choice satisfaction. Unexpectedly, ethical leadership was unrelated to student-athletes’ perceptions of their teammates’ willingness to cheat.

While previous research has suggested the potential importance of gambling outcome expectancies in determining gambling behaviour among adolescents, the predictive ability of gambling outcome expectancies has not yet been clearly delineated for college-aged youth. The current study aims to explore the relationships between gender and outcome expectancies in the prediction of gambling severity among college student-athletes. Data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) study assessing gambling behaviours and problems among U.S. college student-athletes were utilized. Complete data was available for 7,517 student-athletes. As expected, male college student-athletes reported more gambling participation as well as greater gambling problems than their female counterparts. Findings showed positive relationships between the outcome expectancies of financial gain, and negative emotional impacts and gambling problems. That is, those who endorsed more items on the outcome expectancy scales for financial gain and negative emotional impacts also tended to endorse more gambling-related problems. Findings also showed a negative relationship between outcome expectancies of fun and enjoyment, and gambling problems over and above the variance accounted for by gender. Those with gambling problems were less likely to have the expectation that gambling would be fun than those without gambling problems. Despite NCAA efforts to curb gambling activity, the results suggest that college student-athletes are at risk for over-involvement in gambling. Therefore, it is important to explore gambling outcome expectancies within this group since the motivations and reasons for gambling might be able to inform treatment initiatives.

Two large samples of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) student-athletes in 2004 (N = 18,916) and 2008 (N = 17,675) were surveyed about their gambling behavior. A cross-comparison highlighted gambling trends among college-student athletes across the four-year span. Overall, past-year and weekly gambling rates were lower in 2008 compared to 2004. There were no within-gender differences in the proportion of individuals at-risk or meeting criteria for a gambling problem between 2004 (4.0% males, 0.3% females) and 2008 (3.8% males, 0.4% females). Participation rates were higher in 2004 for all gambling activities, except for past-year Internet gambling and sports wagering, which increased in 2008 among males. Across sports, gambling participation was notably highest among golfers of both genders. Collectively, the results suggest that gambling activity among student-athletes is on a downward trend in spite of ongoing expansion of gambling opportunities.

This is an application of contemporary multilevel regression modeling to the prediction of academic performances of 1st-year college students. At a first level of analysis, the data come from N > 16,000 students who were college freshman in 1994-1995 and who were also participants in high-level college athletics. At a second level of analysis, the student data were related to the different characteristics of the C = 267 colleges in Division I of the NCAA. The analyses presented here initially focus on the prediction of freshman GPA from a variety of high school academic variables. The models used are standard multilevel regression models, but we examine nonlinear prediction within these multilevel models, and additional outcome variables are considered. The multilevel results show that (a) high school grades are the best available predictors of freshman college grades, (b) the ACT and SAT test scores are the next best predictors available, (c) the number of high school core units taken does not add to this prediction but does predict credits attained, (d) college graduation rate has a second-level effect of a small negative outcome on the average grades, and (e) nonlinear models indicate stronger effects for students at higher levels of the academic variables. These results show that standard multilevel models are practically useful for standard validation studies. Some difficulties were found with more advanced uses and interpretations of these techniques, and these problems lead to suggestions for further research.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the quantitative analyses informing current academic reforms in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The article serves as an extension of Petr and McArdle’s (2012) previous work. In addition to discussing current reforms in measuring academic success, the author also outlines results from large-scale student-athlete surveys. These data provide a better understanding of current academic reforms and future directions in this area.

The proposed revision of the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling within the DSM suggests removing the criterion of committing illegal acts and reducing the threshold to four symptoms. It has been argued that changing the diagnostic criteria will not impact the prevalence rate of pathological gambling, however there are no published studies examining prevalence rate stability. The impact of the proposed DSM-V criteria using data from a national study assessing gambling behaviors among college student-athletes was examined. Comparison of pathological or disordered gamblers vs sub-threshold gambling severity using current DSM-IV criteria and the proposed DSM-V diagnostic criteria suggests that the proportion of men classified as pathological or disordered gamblers changes. For females, comparisons did not reach statistical significance. The subcommittee of the DSM-V should note that the proportion of males meeting the diagnostic criteria for pathological gambling may be influenced by classification system. Questions related to the validity of the proposed classification system are raised.

The importance of managing, archiving and potentially sharing large-scale data collections has become salient in many academic fields of study during the past decade. Technological innovations have quickly enhanced our ability to manage and archive data. However, the sharing of data among social sciences researchers has remained a rather limited practice (Breckler, 2009; Freese, 2007a), despite some evidence showing that benefits accrue even to the researchers providing the data to others (Gleditsch, Metelits, & Strand, 2003). Although some funding agencies require (e.g., the National Institutes of Health) or encourage (e.g., the National Science Foundation) data sharing in certain circumstances and most social science disciplines express broad support for the practice in one form or another (Freese, 2007b; King, 2007), movement toward routinely sharing data has been glacial in education and psychology among others fields (see Azar, 1999; Breckler, 2009; DeAngelis, 2004). Certainly, concerns about the confidentiality of research participants, the time and cost involved in preparing data for broad dissemination and the desire to fully mine data that may represent a substantial financial and intellectual investment all play into data-sharing hurdles faced in these areas of study. At the same time, most would agree that a discipline benefits when substantial or unique data are made available to other qualified researchers. The study of intercollegiate sport is a discipline that would likely benefit substantially from an enhanced commitment to sharing research data. This was noted during the first annual Scholarly Colloquium at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Convention in January, 2008. Jay Coakley presented a broad review of factors affecting research in the area of intercollegiate athletics, and the ability of scholars to conduct such research effectively (Coakley, 2008). One of the issues that Coakley raised was the wealth of quantitative data collected by the NCAA to answer research questions posed by its members and assist in the development of national athletics policies. Given the difficulties scholars of intercollegiate athletics often face in financing large-scale studies on athletics issues, gaining access to student-athletes on many campuses and even knowing what lines of research are already actively under study at the NCAA, Coakley suggested that “the first and most important strategy for stimulating research on intercollegiate sports is to institutionalize the dissemination of information about the athletic department, sport teams, and athletes to the faculty...

This chapter describes how the NCAA uses academic data on high school and college student athletes and the national policies that have been framed by these data.

There is a commonly held belief within the intercollegiate athletics community that student-athletes perform better academically during their season of athletics competition than they do outside the season of competition. The thought is that the structured nature of the playing season leads to more structure in student-athletes’ academic lives and better academic performance. However, it is difficult to find empirical studies supporting this belief. A series of three studies was conducted to assess whether there is a difference in the grade-point average and credits earned of student-athletes in their season of competition vs. their off-season. These three studies are distinguished by NCAA membership division (Division I, Division II or Division III) and the specific nature of the data available in each of those divisions. The Division III study served as a pilot and examined over 3,000 student-athlete records at eight schools. The Division II study included nearly 12,000 student-athletes at 92 schools, and the Division I study involved analysis of a census of Division I student-athletes at over 325 colleges and universities followed term-by-term for up to four years. The separate divisional studies came to similar conclusions. Generally, the academic performance of student-athletes was shown to be better outside the season of competition than during the season—contrary to the conventional wisdom. The negative in-season effects were stronger in sports known to have high in-season time demands (e.g., Division I football, baseball and softball) and among student-athletes who entered college less well prepared academically.

Objective The authors examined the national prevalence of gambling problems and sports wagering among US college student-athletes. Participants A national sample of 20,739 student-athletes participated in the study. Methods The authors used data from the first national survey of gambling among college athletes, conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Results Men (62.4%) consistently had higher past-year prevalence of gambling than did women (42.8%). The authors identified 4.3% of men and 0.4% of women as problem or pathological gamblers. Among the most popular forms of gambling were playing cards, lotteries, and games of skill, with male-to-female prevalence ratio ranging 1.3-5.6 across various gambling activities. Athletes in golf and lacrosse were more likely to report sports wagering than were other athletes. Athletes in gender-specific sports wagered more prevalently than did athletes in unisex sports. Conclusion Gambling prevalence may be underestimated in this population because respondents' athletics eligibility is at stake. This study provides important baseline data for future cohorts of athletes.

PURPOSE:To examine prevalence and associations of gambling problems and health risk behaviors among college athletes from the first national survey of gambling among U.S. college student-athletes.METHODS:Conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), this self-administered and anonymous survey collected information from a nationally representative sample of 20,739 student-athletes.RESULTS:Males consistently had higher past-year prevalence of gambling than females (e.g., 62.4% of males reported some type of gambling vs. 42.8% of females). Based on DSM-IV Gambling Screen, this study identified 4.3% of males and 0.4% of females as problem/pathological gamblers. A general upward trend existed that as the level of gambling problems increased, so did the prevalence of substance use, gorging/vomiting, and unprotected sex. Cross-group comparisons by gambler type were all significant. Problem and pathological gamblers also experienced significantly more drug/alcohol-related problems than non-gamblers and social gamblers.CONCLUSIONS:Direct associations found between gambling and multiple risk behaviors in college student-athletes support the persistence of the youth problem-behavior syndrome and suggest the need for multi-faceted initiatives to tackle these risk behaviors simultaneously.