Needs Assessments for Gang Problems

Needs Assessments for Gang Problems

A needs assessment is often the first step in planning a comprehensive solution to the “gang problem.” It can help uncover hidden problems, set priorities, and (perhaps most important) help develop a communitywide consensus about what to do. Needs assessments provide local policymakers with an alternative, unbiased source of information? This information is vital if policymakers and service providers are to spend their time and money where it will do the most good.
The consensus-building role of the needs assessment has proved especially useful in many places. As long as funding for social programs remains scarce, communication, coordination, and cooperation among service providers is necessary to eliminate duplication and to ensure that the people with the greatest needs are served.
There are four steps to conducting a needs assessment: laying the groundwork, identifying current activities, identifying and setting priorities, and developing a consensus.
In assembling the team to conduct the assessment, responsibility for big decisions must rest with a large, comprehensive group of “movers and shakers” (the advisory board), while responsibility for implementing the assessment stays with a small team (the assessment team).
With few exceptions, the assessment team’s first step should be to find out whether anyone has ever conducted a youth needs assessment before. Then three questions need to be answered. First, should the assessment focus on primary or secondary prevention? Second, should the assessment focus on all youth problems or only those very closely related to gangs?
Finally, should the assessment team consider all neighborhoods in the city or only those in greatest need?
It may help to conduct the assessment in stages. For example, a city with limited knowledge and resources but a serious gang violence problem may start by assessing the potential for gang violence in each neighborhood, with the goal of increasing direct law enforcement efforts. Once the police, prosecutor, and probation agencies know where to focus their immediate efforts, the assessment team can turn its attention to primary prevention opportunities.
The board should be kept apprised of where the assessment team is at all stages of the process. Letting the advisory board members in on the nuts and bolts will give them ownership of the project and improve the chances that they will accept the results.
The next step in conducting a needs assessment is to identify what services are actually being delivered, where, when, to whom, and if possible, with what effect. Assessors also need to know what services cost and who pays for them.
It is usually enough to implement what is sometimes called a “snowball sample.” That is, the assessors interview knowledgeable members of the advisory board and review readily available documents to get a first-cut list of service providers. Then they interview the directors of these agencies, collecting necessary information and also asking them to name other agencies that provide similar services. Thus the sample increases in size, like a snowball rolling down a hill.
In most cases, a survey of youth, parents, service providers, and others is the centerpiece of the needs assessment—and the most important and difficult part. A series of steps is required to complete a needs survey:
q Decide what to ask.
q Decide whom to survey and how.
q Frame the questions.
q Pretest the survey draft.
q Conduct the survey.
q Analyze and report the results.
The survey will ask about the social service needs of gang-involved and at-risk youth. Useful results can be obtained from at least four separate groups: at-risk and/or gang-involved youth themselves; their parents; service providers, including guidance counselors, employment trainers, public health nurses, and others; and community leaders, including presidents of neighborhood associations, elected officials, and business leaders.
In conducting a survey, the key is getting a representative sample, not merely a large one. The easiest way to ensure a representative sample is to draw a sample at random from throughout the population and to get a high response rate.
People rarely turn down interviewers who come to their door—response rates of 80 percent are fairly common. Telephone interviewers typically get lower response rates—60 to 80 percent. Mail surveys usually get the worst response rates, varying from 10 to 70 percent. Unfortunately, mail surveys are much cheaper than telephone surveys, which are much cheaper than personal interviews.
Interviewing is almost certainly the best method to use in surveys of community leaders and service providers. For surveys of youth and parents, the safest course of action is to contract with a local university or market research firm to conduct in-person or telephone interviews.
If mail surveys are used, rank ordering is usually simple for both assessors and respondents, so it is probably the best method to use. Questions about the importance of various needs should form the bulk of the survey, but other questions may be needed as well. For example, if the team suspects that current gang prevention programs may be ineffective, it may ask service providers and community leaders for their opinions on those programs.
Maintaining a high response rate requires watching return rates carefully and issuing follow-up letters or phone calls when needed. The principal results of a needs assessment survey can usually be presented in a few pages of text (perhaps six or eight) that summarizes the most important results and relationships and backs them up with a few simple tables.
A second approach to identifying the highest priorities requires collection of social indicators—basic statistics that show the extent of bad outcomes.
For example, the police department can supply the number of aggravated assaults in which the victim was under 20 years of age, which in many places is a good measure of gang violence. The school district can measure the number of fights in schools and the dropout rate for each school and grade. The State employment office can supply the youth unemployment rate. These statistics can then be used to track the size of the problem over time and to compare the size of one city’s or neighborhood’s problem to those in other cities and neighborhoods.
Developing a consensus around a set of priorities is vital to the long-term success of gang prevention and reduction efforts. The solution will probably take continuous and concentrated effort over a long period, and a stable vision backed by widespread agreement is critical to success.
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