RG Check is a responsible gambling accreditation program developed by the Responsible Gambling Council, Ontario, Canada. It assesses individual gambling venues on hundreds of criteria based on existing responsible gambling standards and codes of practice. Here, "responsible gambling" refers to efforts made by the gambling venue operator to prevent or reduce gambling-related harm.
RG Check Accreditation is valid for three years, after which a venue can apply to be reassessed. As part of the accreditation process, employees voluntarily complete a survey questionnaire that assesses their awareness and understanding of responsible gambling policies, practices, and procedures within a land-based venue. Data are collected through site visits. There is no identifying information for any survey participant or casino. As of November 2020, 175 accreditations and reaccreditations had been completed. Although the RG Check accreditations are conducted across Canada and internationally, the datasets are restricted to accreditations for Canadian venues only.
These datasets align with two separate versions of the employee survey questionnaire. The original questionnaire was developed in 2011 and then updated in 2015. The datasets represent one-third of all RG Check employee surveys from the time of the program launch in 2011 through to September 2020. Participants were selected using the RAND function on Excel; therefore, the selection process was completely random. The decision to select only one-third of total participants was due to resource constraints related to the anonymization process. The final number of participants in each dataset is N = 3,058 for 2011-2014 and N = 5,204 for 2015-2020.
The datasets contain data from 77 different venues. Each venue was assigned a number only, and no key is available to match the number to the casino name. Venue characteristic information is coded for geographic location only: Ontario vs. non-Ontario. A list of participating venues is available on the RG Check website's Accredited Sites page.
