Gang Involvement and Delinquency among Hispanic and African-American Adolescent Males

Abstract

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.