Objective: The South Oaks Gambling Screen, a 20-item scale developed by Lesieur and Blume (1987), is widely used in identifying pathological gamblers. Two studies examining the reliability and validity of the Turkish Form of the South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS) are reported.

Method: In the first study 59 subjects, and in the second study 73 subjects-participated. The subjects were diagnosed as either pathological gamblers or non-pathological gamblers (comparison group) through the use of the DSM-IV criteria and were given the SOGS. In both studies, statistical analysis revealed no significant demographic differences between pathological gamblers and the subjects in the comparison group with respect to age, marital status, education, employment status and income level. In the second study, pathological and non-pathological gamblers did not differ significantly in their preferred forms of gambling. The two groups were also similar to one another in terms of their gambling frequencies.

Results: Each item of the SOGS was analysed independently by chi-square analysis. Seventeen of the 20 original SOGS items were found to discriminate Turkish pathological gamblers from non-pathological gamblers.  The three items that failed to discriminate pathological gamblers from non-pathological gamblers were replaced with  two culturally relevant items. The cut off point for the 19-item Turkish Form of the SOGS that yielded the lowest false negative and false positive percentages (and thus has the highest sensitivity and specificity rates) was a score of 8. The pathological gamblers had SOGS scores almost 3 fold those of the non-pathological group, and the difference between the two groups was significant. Both test-retest reliability (r= .95) and internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s Alpha= .8772) were found to be significantly high.