Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T05:36:04.466Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Appendix: The Methodology of Studying Street Youth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2010

John Hagan
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Bill McCarthy
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
Get access

Summary

This appendix summarizes our experiences studying street and school youth. We begin by describing the data collection techniques used in our original cross-sectional study. We then outline our panel study and provide details of the various strategies we used to reduce attrition. In the following section, we assess the consequences of attrition by comparing youth who were retained and lost from the panel. Finally, we discuss the validity and representativeness of our data and the suitability of using inferential statistics to analyze them.

Each of the authors of this Appendix participated in the design of at least one of the studies and was involved in one capacity or another in collecting the various data sets. Nonetheless, individuals assumed primary responsibilities for particular studies: John Hagan and Patricia Parker gathered the data for the Toronto school study and supervised the Toronto panel study; Bill McCarthy collected the data for the cross-sectional Toronto street study and supervised and took an active part in surveying and interviewing Vancouver youth for the panel study; and Jo-Ann Climenhage helped to supervise the Toronto panel survey and interviewed Toronto street respondents. We use plural pronouns in much of this discussion because they best reflect the collective nature of our work and eliminate cumbersome and awkward phrases.

Making a Start: The First Study

Our decision to study street youth arose from several conversations we had in the fall of 1986. In these discussions, we often noted the benefits of survey-oriented quantitative criminology, but we lamented the preoccupation of this approach with students, a group that lacked significant variation on key variables for the study of crime.

Type
Chapter
Information
Mean Streets
Youth Crime and Homelessness
, pp. 239 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×