Deconstructing Methodological Paradigms in Adolescent Gambling Research: a Critical Analysis and Future Directions

Four years after Delfabbro & King's (2021) foundational critique, adolescent gambling research continues to struggle with fundamental validity questions. Through a critical narrative review synthesizing literature from 2022 to 2025, we evaluate the field's progress in addressing their core contentions regarding measurement validity, causal inference, and longitudinal evidence. Our analysis reveals persistent epistemological tensions between epidemiological and developmental approaches. The review identifies a validity problem in adolescent gambling assessment: instruments adapted from adult populations fail to account for developmental context, producing prevalence estimates that risk pathologizing transient, age-normative experimentation rather than clinically significant harm. It further documents the problematic conflation of correlational evidence with causal inference in gateway hypothesis research. In response, we propose the Dynamic Harm Assessment Framework, which differs from existing models by focusing on how gambling actually disrupts a young person's daily life, measuring harm against what is realistic at their stage of development, and tracking how gambling behaviour changes over time at the individual level. This shift is necessary for distinguishing transient adolescent experimentation from stable high-risk trajectories, and for targeting clinical resources with greater precision.