The Social Side of the Pathways Model: Examining the Mediation of Social Support on the Relationship between Psychopathology and Problem Gambling

This study uses a large representative sample of gamblers in the Canadian province of Quebec to examine the relationship between social support and psychopathologies commonly associated with gambling problems. Generalized linear modeling is applied to the 2008 Canadian Community Health Survey to find that social support mediates the relationship between mood disorders and problems that a person experiences as a result of gambling. These findings are discussed in the context of developing a framework that understands the features of social support in relation to psychopathological predictors of gambling problems. The study concludes that prominent psychopathological predictors of problem gambling are best understood in the respective contexts of the social environments in which they are found.