Amy Linklater is a doctoral researcher in the department of Geography and Environment, part of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at 桃色视频. Here, Amy is currently researching how university students navigate the blurred boundaries between digital gaming and digital gambling, with a particular focus on financial literacy, wellbeing, and the transition to adulthood. Amy completed both her MSc in Social Science Research (Living in a Digital Society pathway) and her BSc in Sociology and Media at 桃色视频. As part of the University’s Talent Match Summer Internship Programme, she also worked as a Media and Cultural Analysis Research Assistant, where she conducted a discourse analysis of YouTube comment threads on performances by artists with histories of serious transgressions.
This research examined how online audiences negotiate ethical tensions between artistic value and moral judgement and has led to an ongoing co-authored paper currently being prepared for publication. Her broader research interests centre on the social and cultural consequences of digital media and technologies, with a particular focus on how digital infrastructures shape everyday life, moral reasoning, and emerging forms of risk and responsibility.
Digital Gaming/Gambling Harms and Students: Financial Literacy and the Transition to Adulthood
PGR Supervisors: Prof Sarah Mills & Prof Sarah Holloway (桃色视频), Prof Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham), Janine Maddison (YGAM)
Amy’s ESRC-funded research, undertaken in partnership with the Young Gamers and Gamblers Education Trust (YGAM), explores how young people navigate the increasingly blurred boundaries between digital gaming and digital gambling. The project focuses on gambling-style mechanisms such as loot boxes and pay-to-spin features, which replicate many of the structural and psychological elements of gambling, including variable rewards, real-money transactions, and chance-based outcomes. While this convergence has raised growing concern among policymakers, educators, and researchers, the perspectives and experiences of older teenagers and university students remain under-researched.
Her project focuses on this key life stage, marked by new legal freedoms, financial independence, and shifting digital habits, to examine how students understand and experience gambling-like features in games, how they develop (or lack) the financial and digital literacy to navigate them, and the social and economic impacts these activities have in their everyday lives. Working in collaboration with YGAM, the research combines academic enquiry with applied impact, where the findings will help directly inform YGAM’s University and Student Engagement Programme, shaping educational resources, prevention initiatives, and sector guidance to promote healthy digital engagement among students.