Social Network Position of Gang Members in Schools: Implications for Recruitment and Gang Prevention

Abstract

Schools are venues in which gang and non-gang involved youth converge. It is therefore a likely venue for gang recruitment. The extent to which this occurs depends upon the ability of gang members to connect with non-gang members. In this study, we compare the social network positions of high social status gang members who are well integrated into school networks with low status members who are not. Using network data from the Add Health study (n = 1,822), we find that not only are high status gang members strongly embedded within school networks, but that this status is driven by their ability to connect with non-gang members rather than other gang members (indicated by the high number of friendship nominations they receive from non-gang members). These gang members are potentially in optimal positions to influence others to join gangs. The implications of these results for school-based gang prevention programs are discussed.

Keywords:

• gang
• social networks
• schools
• recruitment
• treatment effects

Acknowledgements

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.

Notes

¹ We use the term recruitment throughout the manuscript for a lack of a better term. We understand that recruitment often implies a certain directionality and intent (e.g. a gang member actively looking for new members), however we see these characteristics as sufficient but not necessary in the context of the present paper. Recruitment, here, is defined more broadly as the influence of a current member on the decision of a new member to joining a gang, whether this influence is actively exerted by the current member or not.

² Bonacich (1987) also discussed the reverse dynamic in which being connected to people who are poorly connected makes them dependent on you. This form is less relevant for the current study.

³ A note on terminology is in order here. “Status” has a different meaning in the general social network literature than it does in the gang literature. In the network literature, a person with high social status is one who is optimally positioned in terms of having lots of connections (often to others who are well connected), being centrally located, and/or bridging gaps in the network. In the gang literature, status, or “status problems” (e.g. Cohen, 1955) are related to macro-level mechanisms that divert youths towards the gang subculture when they are blocked from attaining it in the mainstream culture. Status is also often associated with the symbolic benefits associated with the violence and aggressive behavior that gang members engage in (e.g. Anderson, 1999; Cohen, 1955). In this study, our use of the word “status” is aligned with the network literature.

⁴ There were 2,553 participant students from these schools at wave 1 and 1,834 at wave 2. The attrition rate in these schools was therefore 28%. Of these, 1,822 had valid scores on the measure of gang membership and were included in the current study. Missing values on the other variables were imputed via chained equations. The variable with the greatest amount of missing data was “grades” at 12% (220 out of 1,822 cases missing).

⁵ Using this definition, there were 10 high status gang members from the school in the mid-sized city and 7 from the school in the metropolitan area. We also tested models using an alternative indicator in which high status gang members were those who were one standard deviation above the within-school gang member mean (4 high status gang members from the school in the mid-sized city; 11 from the school in the metropolitan area). These supplementary models were less conservative. While three of the social status variables [reach in three steps (average treatment effect (ATE)=12.36); # gang friends—in-network (ATE = 0.30); # gang friends—out-network (ATE = 1.24)] now reached traditional levels of statistical significance in these analyses, the main messages were unaltered. Our decision is therefore to present the more conservative analyses. The supplementary results are available on request.

⁶ There was a high degree of collinearity between race and school attended (one school was 98% white; the other was 6% white). By controlling for race, we effectively controlled for school as well.

⁷ SES and race were both drawn from the wave 1 in-home data-set as the required variables were not collected at wave 2. This is unlikely to be problematic given the general temporal stability in these measures.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Owen Gallupe

Owen Gallupe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. His research focuses on peer influence and offending, social networks, and drug markets. His work has been published in venues such as Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Crime and Delinquency.

Jason Gravel

Jason Gravel is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California, Irvine. His current research interests include social network analysis, street gangs, crime prevention and intervention and co-offending. His recent work has been published in Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Criminal Justice and Behavior.