Kimberly Tobin

Assessing student learning and departmental effectiveness through an undergraduate comprehensive exam

Student assessment helps guide understanding of learning experiences and departmental effectiveness. In this paper one department’s locally developed undergraduate comprehensive exam measuring knowledge in core criminal justice areas is discussed and preliminary results are evaluated. Exam data were collected from seniors and, as baseline, from freshmen. Regression results showed that seniors had significantly more knowledge across all core areas than freshmen. Overall, this lends support to the idea that the department was effective in imparting knowledge to students. There was, however, a gender effect present and possible reasons for this result are explored. Limitations of the assessment instrument and directions for future research are also discussed.

Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective: The Origins of Gang Membership

the results of the risk factor analyses are descriptively informative, but they are also theoretically limited. A risk factor approach provides a somewhat atomized view of gang members that is focused on individual variables; it fails to identify the causal processes by which more distal variables lead to more proximal variables and how they, in turn, lead to outcomes of interest. Indeed, as Farrington has noted, “a major problem with the risk factor prevention paradigm is to determine which risk factors are causes and which are merely markers or correlated with causes. It is also important to establish processes or developmental pathways that intervene between risk factors and outcomes, and to bridge the gap between risk factor research and more complex explanatory theories” (2000: 7). In this chapter we begin to address the general topic of identifying the causes of gang membership. The central question is, Why do some youths join street gangs while others manage to avoid the lure of the gang? We address this question using two complementary approaches. The first approach is more qualitative and is based on the perceptions of the gang members. We asked them why they joined the gang and these open-ended responses provide information on their perceptions of the more immediate influences that led to their decision. The second approach is based in the tradition of causal modeling.

Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective: Gangs in Developmental Perspective: Substantive and Policy Implications

previous studies of gangs and gang members have not, by and large, placed the study of gang members in a life-course perspective. As a consequence there are a variety of important topics in the study of gangs about which we have inadequate information. They include, first, studies of risk factors in which antecedent variables are linked to the odds of later gang membership and studies of causal processes that attempt to identify why certain youngsters join gangs while others do not. Second, although we know from many studies that gang members are more delinquent than nonmembers, few studies of within-individual change examine the extent to which gang membership itself may facilitate this outcome. Finally, although we have some indication of the short-term impact of gang membership on the individual, we have little information on long-term developmental consequences of being a member of a street gang during adolescence. In this book, we have tried to flesh out the picture of gang life by focusing on developmental questions within the context of the Rochester Youth Development Study. This study has a number of design features that aid in the examination of these issues. The Rochester study has a representative, community-based sample of an initial panel of 1,000 adolescents followed from early adolescence to early adulthood. Subjects were not selected on the basis of whether they were gang members, and gang membership was observed as it naturally occurred over the life course, if it occurred at all.

Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective: Long-Term Consequences of Gang Membership

gangs have a powerful , contemporaneous effect on the lives of the adolescents who become involved with them. It is also reasonable to expect that gang membership will have long-term consequences as well, interfering with the normal course of adolescent development and affecting the transition to adult roles and statuses. Although reasonable, there has been surprisingly little research conducted in this area. As early as 1971 Klein commented that “Though the need is great, there has been no careful study of gang members as they move on into adult status” (1971: 136), a view more recently advanced by Hagedorn (1998) and by Decker and Lauritsen (1996). In this chapter we examine whether adolescent involvement in street gangs has long-term consequences in such important developmental areas as family formation, parenthood, and employment. We begin by introducing basic concepts from the life-course perspective to guide the analysis. Life-Course Perspective The life-course perspective recognizes that as people age they enter and move along various trajectories. Trajectories are age-graded patterns of development with respect to major social institutions such as family, school, and work. They capture the long view of development, “linking social and psychological states over a substantial portion of the life span” (Elder, 1997: 955). Short-term changes in the life course, including movement into and out of trajectories, are referred to as transitions. One of the most volatile stages of human development occurs as individuals move from adolescence to adulthood.

Gangs and Delinquency in Developmental Perspective: Characteristics of Gang Members

To begin our study of gang membership, we examine the prevalence and duration of gang membership for the total sample of the Rochester Youth Development Study and for its major demographic subgroups, compare gang members and nonmembers in terms of delinquent behavior, and then assess the proportionate contribution of gang members to the overall volume of crime. The Prevalence of Gang Membership Ever Prevalence The prevalence of being a gang member at any point up to Wave 9, which essentially covers the high school years, is 30.9% of the total sample (Table 3.1). Thus, although most (69.1%) in this urban sample were not gang members, gang membership is not rare. This prevalence rate is rather high when comparisons are made with results in other studies. For example, Klein (1971) estimated that in the four geographical areas covered by his study only about 6% of the gang-age youths in those areas were actually gang members. A similar approach, with similar results, has been used by other field researchers – for example, Moore (1978) and Vigil (1988). In a survey of eighth graders in 11 American cities, Esbensen and Winfree (1998) found that 11.8% of the respondents were gang members. Our estimate, based on a measure of lifetime prevalence rather than a point estimate or annual rate, highlights the importance of looking at gang membership as a trajectory that unfolds with age.