Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

This article reviews the major methods that have been used to study youth gangs and discusses the consequences of their use for what is known about the topic. Despite the development of a substantial scholarly literature, understanding of gang phenomena is limited by critical disconnects between quantitative and qualitative research traditions. It is argued that integration of these traditions will result in a more comprehensive accounting of the causes and consequences of gangs, gang membership, and gang behavior.

This article suggests that participant observation and social network analysis are able to yield complementary perspectives on youth gangs. Participant observation over a long period yields systematically gathered observations and interview narratives. Such data may provide a close-up look at youth gangs at street level; however, participant observation has limitations that constrain its applicability in multisite research. Social network methods added to field research protocols can provide a behavioral and social structural vision of youth gangs. An analysis of egocentric social network data collected in a gang neighborhood casts doubton conventional conceptualizations of gangs as groups and gang boundaries. Compositional analyses of personal (egocentric) social networks of same-gang youth provide measures of peer influence processes beyond participant observation. Comparative analyses of opposite-gang adolescents’ egocentric networks show a wide overlap among intergang friends. The article links such findings to personal shifts in life course and adaptations to chronic poverty.

This article calls for greater attention to the use of comparative studies in street gang research. Five examples of good but noncomparative studies are reviewed to make the case. Then, a number of opportunities for comparative research are reviewed: gang member comparisons, gang members versus non-gang youth, cross-gang comparisons, comparisons across locations, historical comparisons, and methodological comparisons. For each type, selected studies are cited to illustrate the advantages of planned comparisons. The article concludes with some caveats about the difficulties associated with comparative research.

The American study of gangs can no longer start and stop with local conditions but today must also be rooted in a global context. Studying gangs is important because of unprecedented world urbanization, the retreat of the state under the pressure of neoliberal policies, the strengthening of cultural resistance identities, including fundamentalist religion, nationalism, and hip-hop culture, the valorization of some urban spaces and marginalization of others, and the institutionalization of gangs in some cities across the world.

The extensive study of youth gangs over the years has tended to become a field of studies unto itself. Yet, scholars have failed to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of what youth gangs are. Further, collective illegal behavior by youths is not always identified with gangs. One result of this definitional ambiguity is the discrepancy between the reported proliferation of youth gangs in the 1990s and the sharp decline in reported youth violence during the latter part of the same decade. This article proposes a heuristic typology of forms of association and applies that typology to comparative ethnographic data from different areas of New York City. The results suggest that ongoing patterns of collective violent behavior rooted in local social ecology can be relabeled as gang behavior under certain conditions of youth culture and popular moral panic. A broader focus on youth violence and youthful collective behavior is urged.