The Center for Public Policy Looks at Texas Lottery Players... and You Can Too!

The primary goal of the Center for Public Policy's (CPP) demographic study is to provide a snapshot of who is most likely to engage in the Texas Lottery games.  To capture the demographics of both players and non-players, the CPP surveyed 1,702 Texas citizens between mid-September and early October of 2007. Read the report.

While other universities have completed surveys examining the demographics of Texas lottery players, the CPP survey includes two unique aspects. First, to overcome the threat of bias found in a sample of respondents using traditional landline telephones, the CPP study includes cell phone users in its random sample. Using a combination of traditional telephone numbers and cell phone numbers improves the quality of the overall data by including individuals who would otherwise be excluded (for example, consider the number of young people who rely entirely on cell phones).

Second, the CPP study incorporates an innovative interactive geographic feature that the online viewer can use to dig deeper into areas of individual interest. For example, if you interested in finding out how many females living in the San Antonio area play the Texas Lottery—or any other combination of demographic data and survey responses— you can do so by downloading the customized software and data below.

Interested in downloading the software and data? Just follow these instructions:

1.  Right click the file and save to your desktop: lottoview1.0a.exe

2.  Double-click the file to automatically extract the archive.

3.  Open the lottoview1.0a folder by double-clicking on it

4.  Double-click the file lottoview.exe. This will launch the application.

5.  Make the application full-screen, and then drag the demographics panel to the far right and the question panel to the bottom. This will allow a clearer view of the graphics.

6.  Select File/Load Data from the menu at the top.  Click twice on the data directory and choose 2007_records.lto from the dialog and hit Open.  This will load the data file.

7.  Hit ok on the "load completed" popup. You now have the 2007 database in memory and can begin to view and manipulate it.

8.  Select File/About from the menu.  On the right side is a sub-panel called Quick Reference.  It describes the viewing and selection controls.  You can leave it open for reference if you need it or close it.

9.  Use the right mouse dragging to rotate the view, shift + right mouse dragging to zoom the view, ctrl + right mouse button to select a county on the map to center in the display, and finally, use ctrl + the left mouse button to select a county off of the map to get more information about subjects from that county. Keep in mind, when you make a selection with the left mouse button, you will get data relative to the current question (in the question panel) and the current demographics (demographics panel)

10. To change the current question (provided by the examiner) and answer (provided by the subject) use the Question Panel.  The arrow buttons at the right side of the panel allow you to change the current question.  Use the Answer Drop-Down to select the subjects that gave that particular answer.

For instance, the default question is Q1, and the default answer is yes. What is displayed are all respondents in the state that have played Texas lottery games in the past year. Change the answer to no, and you see the respondents that were not lottery players in the past year.

11. The Demographics Panel allows you to look at various demographic factors of the respondents. Select anything in the array of dropdowns and you filter the subjects.  For example, selecting gender = Female for the default question displays only females who have played Texas lottery games in the past year.

12. The main display area shows a three dimensional representation of Texas divided into counties and lottery districts.  Each county has a bar graph associated with it.  If you count the number of boxes in each graph, you will see the number of subjects that satisfy the current question and demographics for that county.  If you then select that county (ctrl + left button) you get the actual counts for the county, the district, and the state — complete with their percentages in the info panel.

13. Hold down the shift key and left-click on any county to bring up the info panel to show you the textual results.

14. Any panel can be closed by hitting the red 'X' in the upper right corner of the panel.  To bring it back up, go to the Panels menu. Panels will remember their positions.

15. If you want to go back to the default location, question, or demographics you can pick it from their respective menus at the top. 

16. Have fun!

  Tell Us What You Think

Let us know what you think about this visualization tool by emailing Jim Granato.