What are the ways we know what we know? What are the various sources of information, how do we interpret them, and how do their sometimes disparate stories fit together? My goal in this chapter is to highlight what I see as needs in future youth gang research, in the areas of both the nature of youth gangs/gang members and our societal responses to them. While this is by no means meant to be an exhaustive account of the state of youth gang research, readers will get a sense of our current knowledge about these issues through the discussion.
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Notes
- 1.
Award #94-IJ-CX-0058, National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.
- 2.
Award #2006-JV-FX-0011, National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view expressed in this chapter are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.
- 3.
The addition of two schools after the publication of this article resulted in a 78% consent rate overall.
- 4.
Some gang scholars would not agree and are, in fact, dismissive of such quantitative endeavors. My view is that there is a place for scientifically sound research of a variety of types because each has its own merits and limits and because only by considering street gang issues from all of these methods and from different perspectives can we truly grasp the nature of the phenomenon.
- 5.
In this chapter, the terms “youth gang,” “youth street gang,” and “street gang” are used interchangeably. Although the studies described in this chapter utilize varying definitions of “gang,” my conceptual focus is on groups that meet the Eurogang definition: “A gang (or troublesome youth group) is any durable, street-oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of their group identity.”
- 6.
Exceptions include the Rochester Youth Development Study, the Pittsburgh Youth Study, and the Denver Youth Survey, which were developed with some comparative analyses in mind; thus, the research instruments contained some common measures. There were, however, differences in sample selection: while they all sampled in high-risk neighborhoods, RYDS oversampled males and PYS sampled only males. The G.R.E.A.T. evaluations adopted some measures from the DYS, but methods and samples differed across the studies, limiting comparability of findings.
- 7.
- 8.
Readers are also referred to Howell (2007), who effectively refutes a number of additional commonly held misperceptions about American youth gangs and gang members.
- 9.
This study used a “restrictive definition” of gang membership, in which youths self-identified as ever having been involved in a gang, as well as indicated their gangs were involved in at least one of four types of criminal behaviors.
- 10.
Esbensen and Winfree (1998) previously analyzed the G.R.E.A.T. cross-sectional data using a restrictive definition of gang membership in which the respondents were classified as gang members if they self-identified as ever having been a gang member and also indicated that their gang was involved in one of four criminal activities. Using this restrictive definition, 8% of all girls and 14% of all boys were gang members; 38% of all gang members were female.
- 11.
Site and sample differences likely account for differences in findings; recall that the cross-sectional study was conducted with 5,935 students in 11 different cities, while the longitudinal evaluation was conducted with 2,045 students in 6 different cities. Restricting analyses to only the four cities (Omaha, NE; Las Cruces, NM; Phoenix, AZ; Philadelphia, PA) that were included in both the cross-sectional and longitudinal studies still reveal significant differences in 8th-grade gang member prevalence: 7.3% of girls and 14.6% of boys in the cross-sectional study and 2.6% of girls and 6.5% of boys in the longitudinal study. The proportion of gang members who were female was similar, at 35.4 and 32.6%, respectively. Differences thus appear to be due to sample, rather than site, differences.
- 12.
- 13.
Restricting the analyses to Philadelphia, which was included in both the G.R.E.A.T. I and the G.R.E.A.T. II longitudinal evaluations, still produces differences in 7th-grade gang member prevalence rates (all students in both studies were in 7th grade): 2.3% of girls and 10.3% of boys were current gang members in G.R.E.A.T. I, compared to 5.5% of girls and 13.1% of boys in G.R.E.A.T. II. Further, the proportion of gang members who were female was lower in the first study: 20% compared to 34.4% in the current study. Again, these differences could represent actual increases in gang member prevalence and female presence in gangs in the intervening decade or they could simply be an artifact of different samples.
- 14.
Use of the term “gang” is objectionable to some Eurogang scholars; it is argued that it can incite moral panic or stigmatize certain groups or individuals; in some locales, use of the term is even taboo (see Peterson, Lien, & van Gemert, 2008 or van Gemert, Lien, & Peterson, 2008, for a discussion). Thus, the Network has agreed that the term “troublesome youth group” may be substituted if the group meets the definitional criteria.
- 15.
- 16.
The reader is referred to excellent overviews of existing gang programs and strategies that include Spergel’s (1995) The Youth Gang Problem, Howell’s (2000) Youth Gang Programs and Strategies, Howell’s (2008) Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency, Second Edition, Gottfredson and Gottfredson’s (2001) Gang Problems and Gang Programs in a National Sample of Schools, and Klein and Maxson’s (2006) Street Gang Patterns and Policies.
- 17.
One can browse program rating guides available on-line to discover gang programs rated at various levels of effectiveness using specified criteria. Care should be taken, however, in accepting these ratings at face value without an understanding and appreciation of the criteria; and, they are no substitute for reading the text of the evaluation publications themselves. The OJJDP Model Programs Guide, for example, classifies the original G.R.E.A.T. curriculum as “effective.”
- 18.
This is an over-simplification of the model, its implementation, and the evaluations to illustrate a point. There is much complexity to these that obfuscates the simple picture I describe, and readers are referred to the original documents for more detail, to Klein and Maxson (2006) for a less favorable critique of this approach, and Howell (2008) for a contrasting view.
- 19.
See the G.R.E.A.T. program website at http://www.great-online.org for more information.
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Peterson, D. (2009). The Many Ways of Knowing: Multi-Method, Comparative Research to Enhance Our Understanding of and Responses to Youth Street Gangs. In: Krohn, M., Lizotte, A., Hall, G. (eds) Handbook on Crime and Deviance. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0245-0_20
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