The application of Rasch modeling to survey responses and official records of 139 Hispanic and 300 African-American males in the sixth through eighth grades at four Chicago inner-city schools is used to construct incremental measures of gang involvement and delinquency. Scale sequence and regression analysis suggest that different social processes operate in gang involvement for the two ethnic populations. In both sets of cross-sectional data, the fitting of linear structural models shows gang involvement to be an effective post hoc estimator of delinquency for these youth, whereas delinquency is not an effective estimator of gang involvement.

Analysis of community-level data on community areas in Chicago substantiates two conceptual dizerences: the fiist. between gang crime and delinquency as community-level phenomena; and the second, between theoretical associations of each of the former to community-area patterns of social disorganization and poverty. One pattern is more common in Chicago's Hispanic communities; the other, in Chicago's black communities. Five measures of the quality of community lije used are gang homicide rate, delinquency rate, unemployment rate, percentage living below the poverty level, and mortgage investment per dwelling. Identijjdng communities as white, black, Hispanic, or mixed and applying discriminant analysis reveal the racial-ethnic communities as distinct social worldx Regression analyses of gang homicide and delinquency rates show that the two measures display ve?y direrent patterns of association with other community characteristics. An analysis of the residual change score for gang homicide mte over two time periods indicates the relative stability of community patterns with poverty measures explaining much of the change in patterns. It is concluded that gang homicide rates and delinquency rates are ecologically distinct community problems. The distribution of gang homicide rates conforms to classic theories of social disorganization and poverty, and the distribution of delinquency rates is more generally associated with poverty. BACKGROUNDEarlier discussions, using lower class culture and subculture frameworks (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960, A. Cohen, 1955; A. &hen and Short, 1958; Miller, 1958), tend to obscure distinctions between gang and delinquent group behavior (Kornhauser, 1978). A few theorists and researchers (Cart-Wright and Howard, 1966; Kornhauser, 1978; Miller 1975; Morash, 1983; ~~ ~ *We thank Commander Edward Pleines, Officer Lawrence Bobrowski, Carolyn Rebecca Block, R. Darrell Bock, members of the Methodology Committee weekly seminar at the University of Chicago, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We thank Mark Stevens for his advice on preparing figures and tables. Computations in this research utilize SPSS/PC+. CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 26 NUMBER 3 1988 381

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