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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Re-Spatializing Gangs In The United States: An Analysis Of Macro- And Micro-Level Network Structures, Ryan J. Roberts
Re-Spatializing Gangs In The United States: An Analysis Of Macro- And Micro-Level Network Structures, Ryan J. Roberts
Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations
Despite the significant contributions from location-based gang studies, the network structure of gangs beyond localized settings remains a neglected but important area of research to better understand the national security implications of gang interconnectivity. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the network structure of gangs at the macro- and micro-level using social network analysis. At the macro-level, some gangs have formed national alliances in perpetuity with their goals and objectives. In order to study gangs at the macro-level, this research uses open-source data to construct an adjacency matrix of gang alliances and rivalries to map the relationships between …
Re-Spatializing Gangs: An Exponential Random Graph Model Of Twitter Data To Analyze The Geospatial Distribution Of Gang Member Connections, Ryan J. Roberts
Re-Spatializing Gangs: An Exponential Random Graph Model Of Twitter Data To Analyze The Geospatial Distribution Of Gang Member Connections, Ryan J. Roberts
Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications
Gang studies often use location-based approaches to explain gang members’ interconnectedness. Although this perspective remains consistent with the proximity principle that the smaller the geographic space, the greater the likelihood of observing connections between individuals, location-based studies limit our understanding of gang member connections to narrowly defined geographic spaces at specific points in time. The advent of social media has re-spatialized gang member interconnectedness to unbounded geographic spaces, where the preservation of online activity can extend indefinitely. Despite having an online presence, most research examining the digital footprint of gangs tends to be descriptive. This study collects Twitter data to …