Search

Copyright of Universitas Psychologica is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There are few studies on pathological gambling (PG) tests and prevalence for Colombian population. The aim of this paper was to obtain both psychometric properties of the Pathological Gambling Short Questionnaire (PGSQ), as well as to calculate the prevalence of pathological gambling (PG) for a non-randomized sample of university and technical courses from all Colombian capital cities. Results showed a PGSQ good internal reliability (0.74) and convergent validity with a cognitive distortions indicator -r(5618)= 0.462, p < 0.001-. The prevalence of possible pathological gamblers was similar to other studies which have used broader measures of pathological gambling (19.2%). Men, youngest people and members of low social class had higher scores in PG. According to these results, it should be confirmed PG prevalence with other measures, in order to boost legal and socio-health actions for prevention of PG in high risk groups and to know utility of PGSQ for Colombian clinical samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]