Irving A. Spergel

Gang Involvement and Delinquency among Hispanic and African-American Adolescent Males

The application of Rasch modeling to survey responses and official records of 139 Hispanic and 300 African-American males in the sixth through eighth grades at four Chicago inner-city schools is used to construct incremental measures of gang involvement and delinquency. Scale sequence and regression analysis suggest that different social processes operate in gang involvement for the two ethnic populations. In both sets of cross-sectional data, the fitting of linear structural models shows gang involvement to be an effective post hoc estimator of delinquency for these youth, whereas delinquency is not an effective estimator of gang involvement.

Book Review: The Gang and the EstablishmentThe Gang and the Establishment. By PostonRichard W.. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 269 pp.

related to this development is the exposure of the student to a holistic experience in an agency so that he can view his professional performance as part of a total agency service delivery system functioning within a community system. In order to achieve the purposes of field instruction, a plan is proposed that provides for a laboratory-observatory and a skills development laboratory experience in the first year, plus a second-year practicum agency experience. In the second-year practicum the student is expected to put the skills he has previously acquired into operation under circumstances approximating those that practitioners experience on the job. Of particular interest is the delineation of skill development in the laboratory-observatory and in the skills development laboratory. It is proposed that the students be exposed in the laboratory-observatory to a wide range of practice context, program, and skills learning through their own observation and limited participation and through the sharing of observations and experiences with other students in similar agencies or projects. In the skills laboratory the student would not be assigned to a given agency on a continuing basis but would be engaged in common experiences that might include simulation games and programmed instructional materials as well as tasks in selected agencies. He would be engaged in the action of practice and the mastery of skills but in a structured and controlled context. Other chapters detail the components of the laboratory-observatory, the skills development laboratory, the use of simulation games, and the details of programmed instruction. Faculty responsible for field instruction in any of the methods might examine the proposed format for teaching and learning skills. Teachers of social casework and social group work, as well as faculty who teach community organization and social planning, should evaluate the possible development of a laboratoryobservatory and a skills development laboratory to prepare students for a second-year practicum that would resemble the existing form of field instruction in a social agency. There appears to be some merit in helping the student to develop specific professional skills before his entry into the practice arena. This kind of field orientation may contribute, as the authors believe, to the projection of the profession into a more advanced stage of development growing out of the strengthening of the academic aspect Book reviews