The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

Chapter 10Self-Reported Offense, Arrest and Lifestyle ChangesIn this and the next chapters we examine outcomes for individual program andcomparison youth. First, we look at changes primarily in self-reported offenses only for programyouth between the Time I and Time III individual gang-member interview. In the next chapterwe look at changes in police arrests for program, comparison, and quasi-program youth betweenthe five-year program and five-year pre-program periods. Second, we attempt to relate theseself-reported offense changes to life-course and life-space change patterns. Although our lateranalysis (when we use police data) covers a longer period of time, the self-report and interviewdata provide much detail about the relation of self-reported offense change patterns to lifestylechanges. We do not yet look at worker service effects on program youth.There are limitations in the use of self-report data in evaluations of gang programs (Tas,Marshall 1999). In the case of the Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project, we were notable to interview or obtain self-report data from youth in the comparison and quasi-programsamples. Self-report data may not account for periods of time when the youth was inconfinement, and not present or at risk for committing offenses in the community. Reliablemeasures of self-reported offenses are particularly difficult to obtain for an extended period priorto the youth’s entry into the program. Also, reinterview failure rates are very high for gangyouth in the open community.We believe that program youth in Little Village were positively identified with theProject. It is possible that program youth who were interviewed at both Time I and Time IIIwere not only different from youth interviewed only once, but may have exaggerated the positive10.1