The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

alcohol use. Self-reported arrest patterns were essentially identical. Thus, we concluded withsome confidence that the characteristics of the analysis sample were representative of all targetedyouth in the program.Descriptive FindingsWe were particularly interested in certain construct or theoretically-relevantcharacteristics that could be associated with deviant-behavior change among youth during theprogram period, i.e., between the Time I and Time III interviews. We included perceivedneighborhood characteristics, household/family background, gang membership status, andpersonal relationship factors. Many of these relationships were statistically significant in thebivariate analyses, but would drop out in more controlled multivariate analyses. In this section,they serve to describe changes at a simple descriptive level rather than through more rigorousanalysis, which we conduct in later chapters.The NeighborhoodThe Latin Kings and Two Six were largely neighborhood-bound, and hung out in certaingang territories – “turfs” – which they defended or sought to expand. One major proposition wasthat if general neighborhood social and economic conditions improved, gang youth behaviorwould improve. Reciprocally, if the behavior of gang youth grew more positive (i.e., less violentor delinquent) neighborhood conditions could be perceived as improved. The gang is an integralpart of the social, economic, cultural, and organizational world – the ecology – of the localcommunity. We expected changes in gang-youth behavior to be associated with certain8.8