The aims of the research were exploratory in nature, intending to fill critical gaps in the existing research literature about gang youth. Original Research: Aims, Plans, and Rationale Topics discussed include the rationale and operationalization of the research methodology, working with community-based organizations, and the recruitment of different gang youth who use varying levels of alcohol and drugs. Putting in work is also an accurate expression to describe the efforts of accessing and interviewing gang-identified youth in LosAngeles for research purposes.Thismanuscript discusses howa sample of gang youth ( n = 60) aged 16 to 25 years from various areas in the City of Los Angeles was recruited into a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded qualitative pilot study about substance use and other risk behaviors. “Putting in work” is an expression used by gang members in Los Angeles to describe committing criminal activity, such as selling drugs.
This article identifies qualitative strategies that facilitate conducting research about drug use among youth in gangs. Sanders, Lankenau, Jackson-Bloom, and Hathazi, 2008). Lankenau et al., 2007) and polydrug or multiple drug use (e.g. Similar studies are needed of the relatively novel topics that have emerged in research about substance abuse 1 such as nonmedical prescription drug use (e.g. In recent years, qualitative studies about gang youth have examined the significance of cannabis ( MacKenzie, Hunt, and Joe-Laidler, 2005), the relationship between substance use and violence ( Valdez, Kaplan, and Cepeda, 2006), the connection between using and selling drugs ( Valdez and Sifaneck, 2004), and substance use amongst female gang youth ( Cepeda and Valdez, 2003 Miller, 2001). Qualitative studies have identified the significance of substance use in the lives of gang youth and contextualized the interrelationship between substance use, violence, and unsafe sexual behaviors. As with crime and violence, quantitative research has found that gang youth are more likely to report drug and alcohol use compared to their nongang peers (see Sanders and Lankenau, 2006 for a review).
Studies on youth gangs have a long tradition of using quantitative and qualitative methodology to examine behaviors such as crime and drug use associated with these groups ( Bursik and Grasmick, 1995 Hughes, 2005).
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