CASOS DE USO EXPANDIDOS

While many different sub-groups of street gangs co-exist in this Canadian city, the decision to focus on Haitian street gang members was motivated by the scope of the original study but also because of the available information on the formation and reproduction of these gangs.

Tremblay (2011) provided an ethnography of one of the leaders of a major Haitian street gang in this city in the 1980s through 1990s. His description of the life of Beauvoir Jean enables a rare insight in the structure, rivalries and criminal involvement of street gangs. The inner-working of street gangs is something that is often ignored in gang research (e.g. Short & Hughes, 2006). Having access to a wealth of knowledge on the structure of Haitian street gangs enables the study of gangs in their environmental context.

3.3.1. Membership and associates

An important sampling consideration is whether associates of gang members should be included in the sample. On the one hand, there are several reasons why associates may be included in the analysis. Gang membership is a concept that is notoriously hard to systematically define. Defining the boundaries of membership has often been contentious in gang research. The network perspective may offer a viable alternative to police denominated and self-report methods of identifying membership. If we are to assume that gang members form distinct groups, it should also be assumed that associations among gang members are more likely to be detected than their associations with non-gang members. Thus, analyzing gang members’ social networks may prove to be a more practical tool to establish gang membership, or perhaps of more practical importance, gang co-membership. Including individuals with ties to gang members formally identified by law enforcement may avoid underestimation of gang membership and may enable the identification of members who are better at avoiding detection. Conversely, examining gang members’ social networks may also help avoid overestimation of gang membership. While police may label an individual as a gang member, his/her network ties may tell a different story.

On the other hand, many reasons might justify removing associates from the analysis given the scope and research decisions of the original project and the information available about gang membership. The original project focused primarily on Haitian gang members. Members of non-Haitian street gangs may be underrepresented in the network, and the size and completeness of their networks may be negatively affected. Moreover, given the focus on Haitian street gang members, less information is available about non-Haitian individuals which may limit the identification of gang membership. Table 1 shows the differences between the two groups on key indicators.

Table 1. Differences between members and associates

Gang members (n=261) Associates (n=192)

Degree- Gang network** 11.25 (8.03) 4.79 (3.65) Betweenness- Gang network** 3852.08 (5758.49) 920.83 (2617.65)

Degree- Full network** 13.21 (9.33) 6.11 (4.16) Betweenness- Gang network** 16986.72 (25087.15) 5056.83 (10177.92)

**p<0.01

Based on the differences identified in table 1, a decision was made to focus on individuals identified as gang members. The information available regarding network size (degree centrality) of both groups indicate that networks of gang members are on average larger much larger than those of associates. It could be argued that the networks of associates may have been reduced by the decision to keep only those associates with 2 or more ties to gang members. However, the significant differences between centrality measures of members and associates in the full network, in which no manipulations were made, indicate that the discrepancy is not an artefact of the

manipulation of the network. Similar differences are observed for betweenness centrality, which refers to the extent to which an individual is a broker in the network.

Although these differences may indicate that gang members have in general larger networks and are more likely to be brokers compared to gang associates, further analyses indicate that there is a strong possibility that this difference is an artefact of data collection. The ethnicity composition of the associate sample also hints at the fact that this difference may be related to the Haitian street gang member focus of the original project. In fact when looking at the differences between network measures of Blacks and non-Blacks (Table 2), we see that non-Blacks are less central than Blacks for both members and associates, although only significantly so for associates. Although these differences may not be an artefact of data collection and might reflect the reality of street gangs in this particular city, the evidence points towards a bias towards Haitian gang members in the data collection. However, given the small number of non-Black gang members and the fact that none of the differences were statistically significant, these cases will be kept for the analysis.

Table 2. Network measures by ethnicity for members and associates

Members Associates

Black (n=236) Non-Black (n=25) Black (n=145) Non-Black (n=47) Degree-

Gang network

11.42 (8.30) 9.64 (4.70) 5.02 (3.88) 4.06 (2.73)†

Betweenness- Gang network

4027.63 (5948.39) 2194.87(3100.11) 1149.00 (2955.75) 216.87 (657.00)*

Degree- Full network

13.37 (9.57) 11.68 (6.57) 6.50 (4.44) 4.91 (2.88)**

Betweenness- Full network

17649.08 (25787.40) 10734.03 (16177.85) 6136.28 (11362.57) 1726.61 (3309.95)*

† p<0.1, *p<0.05, **p<0.01

While analyses regarding the relationship between versatility and social capital will focus on street gang members, it would be a mistake to ignore associates in the network for the computation of network measures. While their individual information may be negatively biased, associates are still important in the overall connectivity of known gang members in the network. These individuals enrich the social capital of the

gang members with whom they associate. In fact, they may bring in the network resources and capital that is unique and foreign to Haitian gang members.