Many faces of addiction: an empirical study on the process of living with and recovering from addiction.

In existing theories, dependence is often reduced to one dominating factor, such as genes, physical dependence, a psychological disorder, will power, family problems or social deprivation. By examining these factors individually, research risks missing important factors and forces that contributing to addiction.  In this project, we use qualitative methods to collected autobiographical data from people with various forms of addiction with an aim to investigate various factors that contribute and sustain addiction, as well as various factors that help the individual to recover from addiction.

The researcher  is part of the larger project ""Addiction" as a changing pattern of relations: Comparing autobiographical narratives about various dependencies" funded by the Swedish Research Council and led by Professor Jukka Törrönen.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Online gambling venues as relational actors in addiction: Applying the actor-network approach to life stories of online gamblers

  2020. Jukka Törrönen, Eva Samuelsson, Malin Gunnarsson. International journal of drug policy

  Article

  Background

  With the emerging technologies of the Internet and smartphones during the last decades, the gambling environment has undergone a massive transformation. In Sweden, and Europe in general, online gambling has more than doubled since 2007.

  Method

  The paper studies online gambling venues (OGVs) as relational actors of addiction. By drawing on the actor-network theory (ANT) and assemblage thinking, we examine how OGVs, as actors in specific networks of attachment, enable the development of gambling addiction and facilitate its continuation. The data consists of life story interviews with 34 online gamblers.

  Results

  Online gambling venues extend the scope of gambling opportunities through space, providing an easy portable 24-hours-a-day access to gambling online and on smartphones. This increases the spatial mobility of gambling to diverse contexts. By linking gambling to more unpredictably evolving patterns of relations, online gambling venues also increase gambling's temporal mobility to intrude in the habitual trajectories of everyday life. By enhancing the gambling mobility through space and time, OGVs simultaneously extend the scope of situations in which gambling may transform from a controlled activity into an addiction. It is then that the actor-networks of gambling infiltrate in the actor-networks of work, domestic life and leisure, and start to feed processes where they are translated to serve the interests of gambling.

  Conclusion

  By giving us tools to challenge simplistic and taken-for-granted explanations of gambling addiction and by allowing us to grasp the flux and changing nature of addiction as a relational pattern of heterogeneous contextual attachments, the actor-network theory can help us to understand the complexity and multiplicity of gambling problems. The knowledge on what kinds of contextual attachments in diverse actor-networks enable harmful gambling and sustain unhealthy relations helps practitioners to focus treatment interventions especially on these contextual linkages and their configurations.

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Show all publications by Malin Gunnarsson Sylvin at Stockholm University