51社区黑料

Congratulations to Alice Airola on successfully defending her thesis 鈥淚nside out: The relationship between mental health, social networks, and gang involvement among young offenders.鈥� Her research provides insights into the complex factors shaping youth involvement in gangs, with the potential to inform more effective interventions and policies.

Abstract

This thesis introduces the concept of psycho-social embeddedness to examine the reciprocal relationship between offenders鈥� inner and outer realities. Framed within psychosocial criminology, social network analysis, and gang research, the study emphasizes offenders鈥� embeddedness in interconnected psychological and social environments. Drawing on the social causation and social selection models, it explores how mental health shapes social network structures and, conversely, how those structures affect mental health, with gang involvement treated as both a contextual predictor and a potential moderator.

Data were drawn from 104 incarcerated youth in British Columbia, Canada, as part of the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offenders Study. Seven clinical conditions and their symptoms were analyzed alongside measures of network size and density, with gang involvement included as a predictor and, in some models, as an interaction term. Clinical conditions and network structures alternated as predictors and outcomes to capture their bidirectional influence. Logistic and negative binomial regressions were employed, first without interaction terms and then with them.

The results suggest that, from a social causation perspective, network density and gang involvement are generally linked to poorer mental health鈥攅xcept when they co-occur, as dense gang networks can sometimes buffer psychological distress. From a social selection perspective, the links between symptoms and network structures were mixed, suggesting that mental health can either hinder, support, or show no clear association with social integration, depending on the symptom. Network size appeared more sensitive to mental health variations than density. Substance use and trauma tended to emerge in connection with socially rich environments and appeared to reinforce them over time, whereas somatic complaints were associated with dense networks but later linked to social withdrawal. Depressive鈥揳nxious moods, angry鈥搃rritable traits, and thought disturbances seemed more harmful in non-gang contexts but somewhat buffered within gang environments. Overall, these findings highlight the paradoxical nature of psycho-social embeddedness, where mental health and social structures intertwine to generate both vulnerability and resilience among offenders.