Youth Gang Membership

The purpose of this research is to evaluate reports of studies regarding the origins of youth-gang membership. The research will set forth a general statement of the sociology of gangs as a social subculture and then discuss five accounts of research into the phenomenon of gang participation. Referring to study design and methods researchers used to address and understand the variety of issues that present themselves where youth gangs are concerned, the research will also suggest a way of studying gang membership, including its causes and the content of gang dynamics.

The fact that youth gangs are linked to violent and other antisocial or criminal behavior is a commonplace of modern experience. Examples of school violence in Littleton, Colorado, and Jonesboro, Arkansas, in recent years show that gang membership is not the only index of antisocial youth; however, a significant body of research explores youth gangs as a sociological phenomenon around which boys (mostly, though there are gang girls) organize, through which they express social and psychological experience, and from which they derive social and personal support even when gang membership overlaps and converges with penalties attached to criminal behavior. The big picture of research into gangs is that the experts desire to understand where and how gangs fit into the larger structure of mainstream society, what gangs offer members that mainstream society either cannot or will not, and what motivates individuals to

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s" who had entered the justice system involuntarily and had been identified as gang members. Otherwise, study subjects consisted of adolescents either self-identified (self-nominated) or identified by school personnel as current or former gang members, or as nongang participants. All studies except one involved subjects interviewed and evaluated within a relatively limited time period. One of the studies (Hill, Howell, Hawkins, & Battin-Pearson, 1999) was longitudinal and prospective in nature; that is, researchers followed subjects included in the sample from age 10 to 18, in an attempt to identify factors of experience that could most accurately predict the likelihood of joining a gang during the teenage years. The basic methods employed by the researchers to collect data for analysis were interviews, questionnaires, and psychometric instruments designed to elicit information on why an individual joined, did not join, or was likely to join or not join a gang. The data were collected, coded, and analyzed for the purpose of identifying and evaluating individual and experiential factors tending to contribute to gang participation. The studies posed gang-membership questions in a variety of ways. Wang (1994) gave classes of high s

Category: Psychology - Y