Successes and Challenges in Recruiting and Retaining Gang Members in Longitudinal Research

Abstract

Members of hidden or hard-to-survey populations present challenges to social scientists seeking to engage them in empirical studies, especially if those efforts are longitudinal. In this article, we document the retention-related successes and failures of a longitudinal, social network-based study of active and desisting street gang members in Philadelphia, PA, and the District of Columbia. A purposive sample was used to identify and track 229 gang members at three points in time over 2 years to explore how the social networks of gang members change. Although gang members have many factors in common with other hidden populations, their criminal behavior and involvement with the justice system, coupled with the sensitivity of the social network survey questions for this study, created hurdles to maintaining research contact over time. With continued and systematic documentation of successes and challenges, academics can build an extensive backdrop from which to continue to study gang youth. If the field cannot devise cost-effective and transferable ways to study gangs beyond single-gang ethnographies, it will limit its understanding of important processes related to gang behavior, including gang joining and desistance.

Method to the Madness: Tracking and Interviewing Respondents in a Longitudinal Study of Prisoner Reentry

“…Instead, such knowledge is stored as artifacts in the boxes and hard drives of investigators, and even then, such information is only unearthed to revisit or extend substantive findings (Moule and Decker 2013; Sampson and Laub 1997). Even when a blueprint of study methods is provided (see, e.g., Arnold 2014; Eidson et al 2016), it is unclear which procedures or protocols are statistically more or less effective than other procedures. Moreover, much of what is known about how to track particular groups is known from the public health literature following substance abusers (Kleschinsky et al 2009; Walton, Ramanathan, and Reischl 1998), high-risk youth (McCuller et al 2002; Morrison et al 1997), and female sexual assault survivors (Ullman 2011).…”

“…Gang membership may further exacerbate these issues. They may be more likely to perceive researchers (and outsiders in general) as untrustworthy and conceivably involved with law enforcement (Becker et al 2014; Curtis 2010; Eidson et al 2016). Despite these concerns, Mitchell et al (2018) found that gang members were just as likely as nongang members to participate in prison research and provide valid responses, standing in contrast to others who find that gang members are more secretive and harder to access by researchers (e.g., Fong and Buentello 1991; Pyrooz and Decker 2019).…”

“…Eidson and colleagues (2016:3-4) note they could not find “any published article or report that specifically focused on methods for identifying and maintaining contact with gang members over time.” The lack of research on imprisoned gang members and documentation of such research when it does occur is problematic because it could be a guide for future research on prisoner reentry. This takes on added significance in light of the fact that gang members constitute approximately 15 percent of the 1.5 million state and federal prisoners, the vast majority of whom will eventually reenter communities across the country (Hughes and Wilson 2004; Pyrooz and Mitchell 2019).…”

“…An added goal of this article is to determine whether these methods were more or less successful with gang members, a particularly challenging group to study. In outlining their procedures in a two-city network study of gang members, Eidson, Roman, and Cahill (2016:2) observed that “there remains little published guidance on field methods to aid researchers in longitudinal studies of gang processes.” The LoneStar Project data are ideal to offer guidance on effective techniques to retain study respondents, particularly gang members, owing to a large sample of inmates ( N = 802, 45 percent classified as gang members) and detailed data gathering on tracking and interviewing procedures. We divide the article into four parts.…”

Risk Factors of Early Adolescence in the Criminal Career of Polish Offenders in the Light of Life Course Theory

“…There is widespread agreement that early criminal initiation is a strong predictor of a long and prolific criminal career [7] (pp. [53][54], [8][9][10]. Thus, there is a high level of social (and academic) sensitivity to early symptoms of "social maladjustment", because such manifestations indicate a risk of amplifying adult crime rates in the future.…”