Perception of sport, sports betting, and gambling from the point of view of university students – The case of the Czech Republic

Abstract

BACKGROUND: University students are one of the population groups that may be affected by the issue of sports betting and gambling. AIM: The main aim of this paper was to discover the overall perception of university students in the Czech Republic of the issue of sports betting as one of the categories of gambling in the context of gender and biological age. METHODS: The bibliographic and citation database Web of Science, and the citation and reference database Scopus were used to analyse secondary data. Selected mathematical and statistical methods were used for the analysis of primary data and information. SAMPLE: The first research sample of respondents consisted of 391 university students in the Czech Republic who had experienced sports betting. The second sample comprised of 679 university students who had had no such previous experience. RESULTS: The results have concluded that there is a relationship between the attitude towards sports betting, as one of the categories of gambling, and the gender, and the age of university students. Furthermore, it has been found that gender does not influence the perception of sports betting as gambling with the possibility of developing a potentially dangerous addiction, while the age of university students does have an effect on such perception. CONCLUSIONS: A quick and easy way of funds acquisition, obtained from sports betting, was determined to be the most common factor intrinsically motivating and appealing to university students in the Czech Republic to participate in sports betting.