Selecting Our Wikipedia Article Topic edit
Our process of trying to locate a topic was lengthy but ultimately successful. We began by narrowing down our choices to two ideal options that we were both interested in and thought would work well as a Wikipedia article: female juvenile delinquency or women prisons. We had not yet narrowed down what our focus would be for female juvenile delinquency, but our goal for the women prisons topic was an overarching description of the differences between men’s and women’s social programs and living situations in United States prisons. In class, we discovered that multiple groups were interested in both mental and reproductive health care in prisons, which was a large part of what we were interested in researching. Therefore, we decided to opt for the female juvenile delinquency topic. Although other groups had also mentioned this topic, it was broad enough that we knew we could carve out a unique focus area. However, we initially had difficulties narrowing the topic down. After a few discussions and brainstorming sessions over the weekend, we had still not come to a consensus.
Potato edit
However, when we began reading Jody Miller’s "One of the Guys" for Wednesday’s class, we realized that juvenile female involvement in gangs fit the criteria for the project perfectly and was something we had both enjoyed learning about and discussing. It had also not been mentioned in class as a topic for another group, so we realized it could be our focus area. Using Miller’s research as a starting point allowed us to launch into ProQuest to find deeper and more specific information.
Potato1 edit
Our research results on ProQuest brought us closer to the topic of female gang involvement. There is a larger amount of recent, peer-reviewed, research than we had expected to find. As of now, our proposed components of the Wikipedia article include why girls join gangs and whether victimization is a highly influential factor (Hayward and Honegger 2014), what makes girls decide to leave gangs and how they do so (O’Neal et al. 2016) , and the social hierarchy of gangs and how girls interact with it (Miller 1998).
Potato2 edit
In order to discover this recent, peer-reviewed research, we found ourselves using a process of trial and error to determine the appropriate search keywords on both Proquest advanced search and Proquest sociological abstracts. For our first attempt, we tried searching “gangs AND girls”on Proquest advanced search. This was not very effective because most of the articles that came up were about girls’ victimization by male gangs instead of addressing female involvement in gangs. Thus, we adapted our search to include “female involvement in gangs” in Proquest sociological abstracts, as well as “girls in gangs AND gender” and “girls in gangs AND gender NOT boys” in Proquest advanced search. This narrowed down our search results and gave us more information directly related to our topic. After adapting our search, we were able to find quite a number of articles that related to our topic.
The most notable of these include: "Gender Differences in Juvenile Gang Members: An Exploratory Study" by R.A. Hayward and Laura Honegger, “ Female Gang Members' Negotiations of Gender” by Jody Miller, and "Girls, Gangs, and Getting Out: Gender Differences and Similarities in Leaving the Gang"[1] by Eryn N. O'Neal, Scott H. Decker, Richard K. Moule Jr, and David C. Pyrooz. After having familiarized ourselves with these articles, we anticipate that they will be both useful and enlightening resources to aid us in our understanding of the many factors influencing female involvement in gangs. In addition to these articles, we also intend to include information from the literature we have discussed in class that pertains to the focus of our research, such as “One of the Guys” by Jody Miller.
From what we have researched, we were able to determine that sociologists are in fact involved in the production of knowledge regarding female gang involvement. By searching the “sociological abstracts” section of Proquest, we were able to find many articles written by sociologists that pertained to our topic. One of which was an article written by the sociologist Jody Miller who is incidentally the author of “One of the Guys”, which we are reading in class. The fact that there is a much larger amount of sociological research relating to our topic than we had originally anticipated is very exciting to us. We look forward to delving into the depths of the many articles we have recently amassed to flesh out our topic and ultimately contributing much needed information about women and crime to Wikipedia.
Bibliography
Hayward, R. A. and Laura Honegger. 2014. "Gender Differences in Juvenile Gang Members: An Exploratory Study." Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work 11(4): 373-382.
Miller, Jody. 1998. “Female Gang Members' Negotiations of Gender”. Paper presented to the American Sociological Association. April 14, 2016. http://ezproxy.carleton.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/61772439?accountid=9892
O'Neal, Eryn N., Scott H. Decker, Moule, Richard K.,,Jr and David C. Pyrooz. 2016. "Girls, Gangs, and Getting Out: Gender Differences and Similarities in Leaving the Gang." Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice 14(1):43.
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