Early Precursors of Gang Membership: A Study of Seattle Youth

Karl G. Hill, Christina Lui, and J. David Hawkins

This study focuses on Seattle’s youth. It was done by the Seattle Social Development Project. This study looked at the behaviors between kids that are in gangs and kids that are not. The study was done in the 90’s. The research question for this research study is “Why do some youth join gangs while others do not?”.  So, the topic would be gangs and their decisions on why they want to join a gang. This is a good question to answer because this way we can know how to prevent the youth from joining them. The type of data used for this study is Acts, Behaviors, and Events. I would use this data because the surveyor wants to know if the children are involved in a gang or what kind of crimes they have committed. The data gathering method they used for this study was surveys and questioners. There were 808 kids that took these surveys.  The type of data analysis they used was categorical data. They were asked whether they were male or female.  They were also asked their age and what ethnicity they were. Overall I think this was a good study. I want to do something like this. I want to look at gang members and interview do them and ask them why they joined gangs. I will use this information to shape my research study. Something I think they did well was the use of graphs to show their results.