Prior research at the regional scale suggests that two components underlie people's evaluations of tourist destina tions: arousing-sleepy and pleasant-unpleasant. A study was undertaken to see if these dimensions also apply at the international and local levels. Although their relevance at the local level appeared to be masked by individuals' personal experiences and knowledge, their applicability at the international scale supports the existence of an underlying general schema in environmental evaluation.

Player loss-risk curves for total gambling losses and for different gambling activities are likely to be linear or r-shaped. For total losses and electronic gaming machines, there is no evidence of a threshold below which increasing losses does not increase the risk of harm.

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Personal construct theory was used to study potential tourists' appraisive images of the major Australian domestic tourist destinations. Seven main evaluative constructs (bipolar discriminations) were identified as being commonly used to appraise destinations. The second stage of the research involved the scoring of places on those seven constructs by potential tourists. Principal components analysis of the resultant matrices showed that construct space generally comprised one main dimension which was labelled favourable ‐ unfavourable. An exception was that older women used two dimensions when appraising destinations. These dimensions were labelled frenetic ‐ relaxing and dull ‐exciting. Respondents distinguished clearly between destinations and the distinctions made were remarkably consistent over different groups of respondents defined on the basis of age, sex, and location.

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To determine whether gambling participation falls into skill and chance-based categories and, if so, to determine the socio-demographic characteristics associated with these different categories. A cross-sectional analysis of all respondents to the 2005 Northern Territory Gambling Prevalence Survey who gambled in the 12 months prior to the survey. Factor analysis was employed to determine whether a chance versus skill-based dichotomy described the structure of gambling participation. Gambler preference groups were constructed using the median of rotated factor scores. Multinomial logit regression was then used to determine independent associations between explanatory variables and categories of gambler preferences. The skill and chance-based dichotomy did describe player preferences for the sample of adult gamblers in the Northern Territory, Australia. Gender, age, household income, household structure and the geographic location (access to gambling opportunities) of respondents were all associated with different degrees of participation in skill and chance based gambling activities. Notably, respondents 35 years and over were significantly over-represented in the low-skill/high-chance participation group, and under-represented in the high-skill/low-chance group. It is clear that the term gambling is a confounding rubric that hides differences both in the type of activity and the socio-demographic profiles of participants. An examination of the latter raises important questions about the role of chance in later life, as well as the role of self-determination in gambling for other groups, particularly younger men.

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