Development and Validation of a Near Miss Scale for Assessing Gambling Tendency

Although near-miss is an important tendency indicator for gambling addiction, no scale has been developed to evaluate these feelings. In this study, the aim is to develop a Near Miss Scale (NMS) to assess the tendency of gambling. In the first step, a 38-item measurement tool was prepared by the first author, which was examined by 8 experts. According to their comments and opinions, a 32-item 5-point Likert-type pre-form was created. The study was conducted with 600 gamblers in Northern Cyprus between December 2018-March 2019 and data from 563 of them were included in the statistical analysis. In the questionnaire, Socio-demographic form, Gambling Craving Scale (GCS), South Oaks Gambling Screening Test (SOGST) and NMS were used. With the SPSS 23 and R Studio statistical programs, after calculating the item-total correlations of the items in the NMS form, items with low item total-correlation values were excluded from the scale and 30 items were analysed statistically. In the study, it was seen that the factor loads of the relevant items in NMS were between .715 and .896. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that a single factor model in the scale was valid. NMS had a positive correlation with SOGST (r = 0.601) and GCS (r = 0.752). The 2-week test–retest results of NMS with a Cronbach alpha of 0.981 were determined as 0.972. The validity and reliability results suggest that NMS is a valid and reliable as 30-item, one-dimensional measurement tool for assessing gambling tendency among gamblers.