Applying the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) to Gambling Disorder: Its Psychometric Properties in Chinese Adults

To date, no study has empirically examined illness perception of gambling disorder (GD), which potentially influences one’s cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to GD. This study aims to address this gap by adapting the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) for GD and testing its psychometric properties in the Chinese context. An anonymous survey was conducted among 690 Chinese adults (40.4% male) aged 18 to 29 years (M = 19.80, SD = 1.51). Factor analysis results supported a 30-item, 7-factor model of IPQ-R for GD, encompassing consequences, personal control, demoralization, treatment control, timeline cyclical, illness coherence, and emotional representations. All of the IPQ-R factors showed satisfactorily high reliability and good convergent validity as supported by the expected correlations with the stigma against people with GD. Our results provide empirical evidence for using IPQ-R to assess illness perception of GD.