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Gang Membership and Mental Health During the Transition to Adulthood

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Abstract

Objectives

There is an increasing understanding that mental health may be a collateral consequence of joining a gang. The objective of the present study is to assess the effect of gang joining on a set of diverse mental health outcomes that include depression, anxiety, hostility, and paranoid ideation.

Methods

To reduce bias in our comparisons, we balance gang-joiner and gang-abstainer groups by applying the entropy balancing algorithm to longitudinal data from the Pathways to Desistance study.

Results

The results indicate that joining a gang is implicated in poor outcomes for all four measures of mental health considered in our analysis. The observed associations persist both at the first and second wave after joining a gang.

Conclusions

To understand more comprehensively both the short- and long-term consequences of gang joining, scholars of crime and justice must expand their focus to include mental health—not solely as a predictor of group offending but also as its consequence. Future studies should also consider mental health in the context of gang desistance.

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Notes

  1. The prevalence of missing values across our treatment and control groups (gang-joiners and gang-abstainers) is not significantly different.

  2. Conversely, first-time gang-joiners can also leave the gang—it is important to note that once they join a gang they are no longer eligible to be in the control sample even if they report no gang involvement at later waves. Our sample tends to remain in the gang for approximately 30 months (SD = 24.42) but some leave as soon as five months after joining while others continue their involvement for the entire study (86 months). It is important to note that these values were computed using the biannual/annual interview data and not the monthly life calendar data also available for the PtD data—as such, it is likely that these values are slight overestimates of time spent in the gang.

  3. Not all respondents had both or either parental figure to compute the warmth or hostility measures. We assume a value of zero for these cases and flag these observations with a dummy variable in the balancing algorithm.

  4. Moments are expected values that describe a probability distribution of a random variable. The first three moments are the mean, variance, and skewness.

  5. Deciding on the appropriateness of the propensity score by concluding that “the estimated propensity score is appropriate if it balances covariates” (Imai and Ratkovic 2014, 244). Avoiding such tautology is also characteristic of some other balancing approaches, including generalized boosted regression.

  6. The overwhelming majority of each comparison consists of some combination of 6-month recall windows. For example, 86.4% of the control group weights (63.93 out of 73.99) and 90.5% (67 of 74) of first-time gang-joiner observations come from the first six waves of data in the Time = 0 comparison. These same figures for the Time + 1 (Waves 1 through 5) and Time + 2 (Waves 1 through 4) are 85.2 (control) /92.2% (treatment) and 82.1 (control) /89.1% (treatment), respectively. Although there is a slight discrepancy between the control and treatment group values, it is also the case that the number of months in a recall period can vary due to issues scheduling interviews with subjects. Given that we balance on the actual number of months in the recall period (up to the third moment of this distribution), we are confident that the recall windows are approximately identical across groups.

  7. Full balance tables for each outcome-time period comparison are available in the Appendix.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their careful and detailed comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, 123 Washington Street, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA

    Valerio Baćak

  2. Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina—Charlotte, 9201 University City Blvd., Colvard North Room 5062, Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA

    Samuel E. DeWitt & Shannon E. Reid

Author notes

  1. The first two authors Samuel E. DeWitt and Valerio Baćak share first authorship.

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    1. Valerio Baćak
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    Appendix

    Appendix

    Full Entropy Balancing Results

    See Tables 4, 5 and 6.

    Table 4 Entropy balancing results (Time = 0 comparison)
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    Table 5 Entropy balancing results (Time + 1 comparison)
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    Table 6 Entropy balancing results (Time + 2 comparison)
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    Baćak, V., DeWitt, S.E. & Reid, S.E. Gang Membership and Mental Health During the Transition to Adulthood. J Quant Criminol 38, 567–596 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-021-09502-z

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