L. Thomas Winfree

Youth Gangs and Definitional Issues: When is a Gang a Gang, and Why Does it Matter?:

The recent explosion in gang research has highlighted the importance of consistent definitions for gang affiliation and gang-related crime. Definitional questions have assumed greater significance in the wake of broad-ranging prevention and intervention strategies. In this article, the authors utilize a sample of approximately 6,000 middle-school students to examine the youth gang phenomenon using five increasingly restrictive membership definitions. The least restrictive definition includes all youth who claim gang membership at some point in time. The most restrictive definition includes only those youth who are current core gang members who indicate that their gang has some degree of organizational structure and whose members are involved in illegal activities. The authors examine the differentially defined gang and nongang youths on various demographic characteristics, theretical factors, and levels of self-reported crime. The authors also address the theoretical and policy implications of shifting definitions of gang membership.

The Empirical Status of Social Learning Theory: A Meta‐Analysis

Social learning theory has remained one of the core criminological paradigms over the last four decades. Although a large body of scholarship has emerged testing various propositions specified by the theory, the empirical status of the theory in its entirety is still unknown. Accordingly, in the present study, we subject this body of empirical literature to a meta‐analysis to assess its empirical status. Results reveal considerable variation in the magnitude and stability of effect sizes for variables specified by social learning theory across different methodological specifications. In particular, relationships of crime/deviance to measures of differential association and definitions (or antisocial attitudes) are quite strong, yet those for differential reinforcement and modeling/imitation are modest at best. Furthermore, effect sizes for differential association, definitions, and differential reinforcement all differed significantly according to variations in model specification and research designs across studies. The implications for the continued vitality of social learning in criminology are discussed.

Coppin' an attitude: Attitudinal differences among juveniles toward police

Abstract Using data collected from 5,477 eighth grade students in eleven U.S. cities, this article explores the attitudes of juveniles toward police through five specific questions: (1) Do juveniles hold positive attitudes toward police, similar to those reported for adults?; (2) Are there differences in attitudes toward police across different racial and ethnic groups?; (3) Do attitudes toward police vary by gender?; (4) Does the city in which a juvenile resides affect his or her attitudes toward police?; and (5) Does the city where the juvenile resides interact with the race or ethnicity of the juvenile to produce a difference in attitudes toward police? Descriptive analyses suggest that unlike the favorable attitudes reported by adults, juveniles are relatively indifferent in their perceptions of police. Significant differences by race/ethnicity, gender, and city of residence were also found. The article concludes with a discussion of factors that may explain these differences and policy implications of the findings.

Differences between Gang Girls and Gang Boys Results from a Multisite Survey

During the past decade, a growing body of literature examining gang girls and the involvement of girls in violence has appeared. In this article, we contribute to this developing literature by using data from a multisite evaluation to explore the extent to which gang girls are similar to or different from gang boys in terms of their attitudes, perceptions of their gangs, and their involvement in ganglike illegal activities. Findings indicate that gang girls are involved in a full array of illegal gang activities, although not as frequently as the gang boys. Whereas similarities exist in behavioral activities and in reasons for joining gangs, gang girls report greater social isolation from family and friends than do gang boys. The gang girls also report lower levels of self-esteem than do the boys. These gender differences are discussed in terms of differential developmental trajectories for boys and girls.

Race and gender differences between gang and nongang youths: Results from a multisite survey

Most examinations of youth gangs have been limited to a single city or a single state. In this article we examine gang affiliation in a multisite survey of 5,935 eighth grade students in 42 schools located in 11 cities across the United States. We use this diverse sample to examine two related issues: the demographic composition of gangs and the level of delinquent activity of gang members compared with nongang members. Our findings call into question the validity of prevailing notions about the number of girls in gangs and their level of delinquency involvement, and the number of white youths active in gangs and the extent of their illegal activities.

Social Learning, Self-Control, and Substance Abuse by Eighth Grade Students: A Tale of Two Cities

Social learning theory has been used to explain substance abuse among adolescents literally from its inception in the 1960s. This theory suggests that basically good children learn to become substance abusers due to such social forces as internalized definitions supportive of delinquent behavior, the influence of delinquent peers, the presence of powerful social reinforcers, and the absence of adequate social punishers. Self-control theory, a more recent theoretical entry, has rather different views about adolescent misbehavior: children become delinquent owing to inadequate parenting and poorly developed self-controls. Taken together these two perspectives should provide unique insights into the self-reported substance abuse of eighth grade students in two rather different cities: Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, despite the considerable differences between the two cities. We address the following question: to what extent do social learning theory and self-control theory provide insights into the city-specific patterns of self-reported substance abuse. We also review the theoretical and policy implications of our findings.

Self-Control and Variability Over Time: Multivariate Results Using a 5-Year, Multisite Panel of Youths

Gottfredson and Hirschi claimed, as part of their general theory of crime, that a child’s criminal propensity, what they called level of self-control, is fairly fixed by age 10. Low self-control children, they further claimed, exhibit greater proclivities for delinquency and analogous behaviors than children with high levels of self-control. They see self-control levels for children at both ends of the spectrum—and their propensities for crime and analogous behaviors—as immutable over the life course. The authors explore the self-control levels, self-reported illegal behavior, and supporting attitudes exhibited by a panel of youths from in six cities at five points in time. Some of our findings substantiated Gottfredson and Hirschi’s claims (e.g., claims linking self-control, sex, and race or ethnicity); however, other findings are at odds with their theory (e.g., the unchanging nature of self-control). The authors review the implications of these findings for self-control theory.

Social learning theory, drug use, and American Indian youths: A cross-cultural test

Contemporary delinquency theories have been challenged as being biased by inherent cultural myopia, even though there have been few tests of these theories involving samples that share all theoretically important characteristics except cultural heritage. In particular, recent studies of delinquency among American Indians suggest that the central constructs of these explanatory models may operate differently among Indians or may translate poorly into the “Indian experience.” Using a census of rural American Indian and Caucasian youths who lived close to one another, we examined the empirical link between key social learning theory constructs and self-reported deviant behavior. Although there were some intergroup differences, the selected theoretical constructs yielded considerable insights into the level of self-reported youthful misbehavior, in this instance alcohol and marijuana use, of both subgroups.

Youth gangs and incarcerated delinquents: Exploring the ties between gang membership, delinquency, and social learning theory

This paper explores the conceptual and empirical ties between membership in youth gangs, youthful misconduct, and Akerss social learning theory. The adolescent population studied, however, is unique: it consists of adjudicated and incarcerated delinquents. The data for the study were obtained by conducting a census of all youths in the custody of the New Mexico Youth Authority in January 1991; more than 85 percent of all youths incarcerated on the administration day (258 young men and women) participated in the study. We found that gang members had acquired more pro-gang attitudes than nongang youths and were more favorably inclined toward gang activities; neither gang membership nor the gang-based social learning theory variables, however, were related uniformly to all forms of self-reported delinquency. We address the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

Youthful Suicide and Social Support Exploring the Social Dynamics of Suicide-Related Behavior and Attitudes Within a National Sample of US Adolescents

Since the late-nineteenth century, scholars have investigated how structural elements within a community—what is now called social support—relate to suicide. However, social support has rarely been used to study adolescent suicide, particularly within a nationally representative sample. The current study, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), explores the ties between social support mechanisms and adolescent expressions of suicide ideation and suicide attempts. Using the 2-level hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) technique, the current study found that such phenomena can be understood in terms of social support and certain individual factors, some common to both ideation and attempts, others unique to one or the other. Moreover, suicide ideation and attempts were linked to the risk-taking behaviors of the youths, their friends, and their family members. Feeling safe at school was one of the most consistent protective factors included in the study.