Essay Sample on Recruitment Methods of Street Gangs and Domestic Terrorists

Inputs and data collection strategy

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

The main objective of this study is to prove that there is a correlation between the recruitment methods of street gangs and domestic terrorists. To achieve this objective, the following three inputs will be required:

Informants (people)

Time

Money

While street gangs deal with drugs, mugging and armed robbery, domestic terrorists target people, infrastructure and systems to drive political points (RAND, 2016). It is therefore necessary to use informants to understand how both groups operate. Informants will provide the data on how street gangs and domestic terrorists recruit and socialize their members. Therefore, the informants must be members from both groups. One informant will provide details of recruitment in street gang and must be from the street gang. The second informant will be drawn from a domestic terrorism group. However, domestic terrorist are hard to reach to. Therefore, intelligence reports on methods of recruitment into domestic terrorism group will be used. This investigations and information seeking requires patience and thus adequate time will be required. Approximately two months will suffice to obtain reliable information. Informants, especially those from the street gangs, will require a token of appreciation for their information and therefore money will be invested in this project

Outputs

The main output for this project will be information about recruitment methods of both groups. Specifically, the information will contain details about radicalization methods, age of recruitment, entry fee or any other information relating to gang recruitment.

Outcome indicators

The outcomes of the research will be the level correlation between recruitment into street gangs and into domestic terrorism groups. This correlation will be indicated by presence or absence of recruitment fee, radicalization procedures if any, reasons for entry into any group, and socio-demographic characteristics of recruits for both groups including race, age and religion.

Variables and Data

Since this is a correlational study, the outcome variable will be recruitment into a street gang or domestic terrorism group. The predictor variable will include race, religion, ideological orientation, political stand and sociological factors like social exclusion and so on. Data that will be collected includes methods of recruitment into street gangs or domestic terror groups.

Research Data Availability

Densely (2009) carried a research about how gang leaders screen and select potential gang members. This research was carried out using ethnographic fieldwork with street gang members in London. This implies that it is possible to obtain data by using information from street gangs. Furthermore, gang members are cooperative with investigators as long as the latter are not exposing their secrets to security forces. Regarding domestic terrorists, there is vast data from informants inside and outside the country. Intelligence units are also willing to provide information about patterns of recruitment and radicalization of domestic terrorists.

Sampling strategy

Snowballing will be used as the sampling method. I will start with people savvy with the operations of street gangs to reach to a street gang informant. To get reliable and valid data, at least three street gang informants will be used. The first informant found will give links to finding the next one and so on. Then, the data collected from the three informants will be compared and analyzed for consistency. Regarding domestic terror groups, information gathered from the intelligence will lead the investigator to recruiters of the domestic terrorists.

References

Densley, J. A. (2012). Street gang recruitment: Signaling, screening, and selection. Social problems, 59(3), 301-321.RAND. (2016). Domestic Terrorism. Available At http://www.rand.org/topics/domestic-terrorism.html