Chris Melde

What Do We Know About Gangs and Gang Members and Where Do We Go From Here

This review provides an opportunity to assess the current state of gang research and suggest directions for its future. There has been a dramatic increase in research on gangs, gang members, and gang behavior since the early 1990s, making this review especially timely. We use Short’s three-level framework of explanation to organize the findings of prior research, focusing on individual-, micro-, and macro-level research. Attention is focused on the findings of such research, but we also examine theoretical and methodological developments as well. Drawing from Short and life-course research, we introduce a cross-level temporal framework to guide future directions in gang research.

Active Parental Consent in School-Based Research How Much Is Enough and How Do We Get It?

Active parental consent policies have been blamed for low participation rates and selection bias (i.e., loss of “high-risk” youths) in school-based studies. In this article, the authors describe active consent procedures that produced an overall active consent rate of 79% in a sample of more than 4,500 middle school students attending 29 schools in seven cities across the United States. Consent rates, however, varied considerably both within and between schools. To better understand factors associated with active parental consent rates, the authors examined district-level, school-level, and teacher-specific effects on consent rates.

Addressing Program Fidelity Using Onsite Observations and Program Provider Descriptions of Program Delivery.

Over the past quarter-century, evaluation researchers have recognized the importance of documenting implementation practices of programs as they are transferred from controlled to realworld settings. As programs become widely disseminated in the general population, there is a tendency for practitioners to alter programs in a manner more conducive to their immediate needs, which may adversely affect program outcomes. The current paper uses findings from an ongoing evaluation of a school-based victimization prevention program to highlight some of the difficulties in maintaining a high degree of fidelity when providing prevention programming in a school-based setting. The results, based on observations of program delivery and program provider descriptions of implementation, allow for the examination of fidelity based on different data collection techniques.

Gang Membership and Adherence to the “Code of the Street”

Gang members have been found to engage in more delinquent behaviors than comparable nongang youth. Few empirical attempts have been made to identify the group processes associated with the gang experience that lead to such noteworthy behavioral outcomes. While not developed to explain gang behavior, Elijah Andersons “code of the street” framework may prove insightful. Utilizing data from a diverse school-based sample of 2,216 youth, we examine the efficacy of street code-related variables to explain gang members’ heightened involvement in violent offending. Utilizing methods based on a potential outcomes framework, results suggest that joining a gang facilitates greater ascription to street code-related attitudes and emotions, and these constructs partially mediate the relationship between gang joining and the increased frequency of violent offending.

The Victim–Offender Overlap and Fear of In-School Victimization: A Longitudinal Examination of Risk Assessment Models

Reports of serious violence in schools have raised general awareness and concern about safety in America’s schools. In this article, the authors examine the extent to which in-school victimization is associated with students’ perceived risk and fear of victimization. By expanding on Ferraro’s risk assessment framework, the current study explores the etiology of fear of in-school victimization using longitudinal data from 1,450 youth between the ages of 10 and 16. Along with prior literature, current findings suggest that victimization and fear are empirically distinct. By focusing educational material on the social determinates of victimization, school administrators may be able to simultaneously reduce fear among youth least likely to be victimized and instill a realistic level of fear among students most at-risk of future victimization.

Homicide as Infectious Disease: Using Public Health Methods to Investigate the Diffusion of Homicide

This study examined the spatial and temporal movement of homicide in Newark, New Jersey from January 1982 through September 2008. We hypothesized that homicide would diffuse in a similar process to an infectious disease with firearms and gangs operating as the infectious agents. A total of 2,366 homicide incidents were analyzed using SaTScan v.9.0, a cluster detection software. The results revealed spatio-temporal patterns of expansion diffusion: overall, firearm and gang homicide clusters in Newark evolved from a common area in the center of the city and spread southward and westward over the course of two decades. This pattern of movement has implications in regards to the susceptibility of populations to homicide, particularly because northern and eastern Newark remained largely immune to homicide clusters. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings, as well as recommendations for future research, are discussed.

The Effect of Self-Control on Unit and Item Nonresponse in an Adolescent Sample

In A General Theory of Crime, Gottfredson and Hirschi dispute whether valid self-report data can be collected among respondents lacking self-control. This research tests this argument by examining two processes that undermine the validity of self-report data: unit and item nonresponse. Specifically, this research addresses two questions: Within a longitudinal self-report study, are respondents with lower self-control less likely to be retained in annual follow ups? And are respondents with lower self-control less likely to complete a self-report survey in its entirety? These questions are examined with an adolescent sample from the National Evaluation of the Gang Resistance and Education Training Program. Current findings reveal that, after adjusting for the influence of student sociodemographic characteristics, self-control is unrelated to sample retention during four annual waves of data, but current findings do reveal that lower-self-control adolescents are more likely to leave survey items unanswered. Implications for the testing of self-control theory are explored.

‘May Piece Be with You’: A Typological Examination of the Fear and Victimization Hypothesis of Adolescent Weapon Carrying

The causes and correlates of adolescent weapon carrying have received considerable scholarly attention. One common explanation of adolescent weapon carrying, the “fear and victimization hypothesis,” identifies the fear of victimization as a motivating force behind this behavior. Empirical studies of this explanation, however, have produced mixed results. One potential source of this ambiguity is the myriad data and measurement issues that have arisen in prior studies of the topic. The current study addresses many of these limitations through the use of panel data from over 1,100 youth across the United States. Through a typological approach, results support a multiple pathways framework for explaining adolescent weapon carrying, as the perceived risk of victimization is positively associated with weapon carrying for those youth who report both victimization and offending experiences. For those youth who are “pure offenders,” fear of victimization is inversely related to weapon carrying, while the perceived risk of victimization is unrelated to carrying weapons. Consistent with prior literature, results indicate that gang members report a disproportionately high level of weapon carrying.

The Relative Impact of Gang Status Transitions Identifying the Mechanisms of Change in Delinquency

Objectives: Explore the relative impact of transitions into and out of gangs on adolescent involvement in delinquency and determine the mechanisms associated with these changes in deviant behavior. Method: Hierarchical discontinuous regression models are utilized to examine changes in elevation and slope in outcomes associated with gang membership status transitions using six waves of panel data from a school-based sample of 512 gang-involved youth. Result: Results reveal the potential for gang membership to have an enduring impact on involvement in delinquent activity, but also on attitudes, emotions, and unstructured activities associated with a higher risk of offending. Heightened elevation in proximate postgang membership observations of offending was mediated by the mechanisms associated with a turning point. Conclusions: Gang membership, however brief, can have an impact on adolescent development after self-reported membership ends. While desistance from gang membership is a good first step in promoting better outcomes, youth remain more at risk of antisocial behavior after leaving the gang than they were prior to joining such groups. Research on the enduring impact of gang membership is needed, as well as programs and policies that might lessen the severity of the impact of gang membership on later life outcomes.

On the Efficacy of Targeted Gang Interventions: Can We Identify Those Most at Risk?

One of the explicit goals of many recent and ongoing criminal justice interventions is to target youth most at risk for involvement in serious, chronic, and violent offending. While targeted programs appear promising at the conceptual level, data limitations have made systematic evaluations of the efficacy of such practices difficult to achieve. The current study helps to fill this void in the literature by examining the relative risk of youth targeted for prevention and intervention services with a comparable sample of youth from the general school population in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Results suggest that youth targeted by the program under study were significantly less at risk in three of the four risk domains examined, and in seven of the twelve associated subdomains. Further, the nontargeted sample had higher accumulated risk than the targeted sample, which is a robust predictor of gang involvement. Implications for targeted prevention and intervention programs are discussed.