The extensive impact of gang-related harms on communities has led to a broad range of stakeholders investing in attempts to respond to gangs. Resultantly, many gang definitions, typologies, and explanations have been developed and adopted. This uncoordinated multiplicity has presented significant difficulties for developing shared understandings and responses to gangs across relevant parties. To overcome such pitfalls, researchers have begun to pursue a framework of unificationism through the establishment of consensus definitions of gangs, cross-disciplinary research teams, and unified theories for gang occurrences. Drawing upon insights from other disciplines, we argue against the adoption of an overarching unificationist framework instead endorsing a pluralistic approach to gang research. We develop a novel framework – The Conceptual Framework for Gang Research – for guiding the coordinated construction/adoption of a multiplicity of conceptual tools specifically tailored to facilitate the diverse aims of gang researchers and demonstrate the utility of this approach over current conventional approaches.

与帮派有关的伤害对社区的广泛影响已导致广泛的利益相关者进行投资，以对付帮派。结果，许多帮派的定义，类型和解释得到了发展和采用。这种不协调的多重性为在有关各方之间发展对黑帮的共识和应对提出了巨大的困难。为了克服这些陷阱，研究人员开始通过建立帮派的共识定义，跨学科研究团队以及针对帮派发生的统一理论来追求统一主义的框架。借鉴其他学科的见解，我们反对采用总体的统一主义框架，而不是赞成多元化帮派研究方法。我们开发了一个新颖的框架-帮派研究的概念框架-指导协调构建/采用多种概念工具，这些工具专门为促进帮派研究人员的多样化目标而量身定制，并证明了该方法在当前常规方法中的实用性。