Gambling participation and pathology in the United States--a sociodemographic analysis using classification trees.

This article describes an analysis of gambling and gambling pathology from a telephone survey of 2631 U.S. residents, using Chi-square Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID). Catholics were more likely to have gambled (92%) than Protestants (78%), and elderly Protestants were the least likely (55%) group to have gambled. Among past-year gamblers, men gambled more often (74 times) than women (46 times). The most frequent gamblers were divorced, widowed, or cohabiting men (125 times). Minorities were much more likely than whites to be problem gamblers (PGs). Nonpoor, married, or widowed whites were the least likely to be PGs.