ABSTRACT
Historically, gang versus nongang classifications have tended to dominate academic, law enforcement, and public discourse. This has ultimately engendered a stigma around gang membership that can follow a former member long after their association with the group has ended. However, there is variation in gangs that has been described at both the group level (e.g., traditional, neotraditional, compressed, collective, and specialty gang typologies and the constituent group-member level distinction between core and peripheral gang members, and subsequent inclusion of floating, wannabe, and veteran members). Beyond such typologies, continuum-based approaches (whereby individual membership ranges from lower to higher levels of gang embeddedness) have recently garnered academic attention. This chapter explores issues around such variation in gang membership. It evaluates how we define differential levels of gang membership, and the range of methodologies employed to identify gang membership levels. It also presents research findings that examine social and psychological factors associated with gang membership and considers how these vary according to levels of embeddedness in a gang. It concludes by noting the importance of considering differential gang membership for prevention and intervention strategies, and calls for further research to develop theory and to tackle gang membership.
