It has long been known that structural conditions impact crime and delinquency, including gang involvement. Youth living in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage, including deep impoverishment, intergenerational reliance on public assistance, obstinate unemployment, and disproportionately high rates of female-headed households, are more likely to be involved in gang activity. Rather than challenge this long-standing relationship between structural disadvantage and crime, this paper seeks to further parse apart the relationships among neighborhood disadvantage, race-ethnicity, and gang involvement to better understand whether neighborhood disadvantage mediates the relationship between race-ethnicity and gang membership. Another goal of this research is to explore the impact of concentrated disadvantage on gang membership at various levels of disadvantage. While it is fairly straightforward to conclude that the most advantaged communities versus underclass neighborhoods will have lower rates of gang involvement, fewer studies have paid attention to communities that fall between this dichotomy of desirable and disadvantaged areas. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the 1990 U.S. Census, this paper addresses these concerns among a nationally representative sample of African American, Latino, and white youth ages 13-21 (N= 6,991). The results of this study show that 1) neighborhood disadvantage mediates the relationship between race-ethnicity and gang membership among African Americans, but not among Latinos and 2) underclass neighborhoods are much more likely to produce gang membership than any other type of neighborhood, including communities that are affluent or have medium levels of disadvantage.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-01252012-122826 |
| Date | 25 January 2012 |
| Creators | Laske, Mary Therese |
| Contributors | C. Andre Christie-Mizell, Tyson Brown |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-01252012-122826/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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