Mitchell Centre Seminar Series
Dates: | 21 March 2018 |
Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
What is it: | Seminar |
Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Marie Ouellet - Georga State University, Martin Bouchard, Yanick Cherette: The Network Dynamics of Criminal Group Persistence
What leads a minority of criminal groups to persist over time? Although most criminal groups are characterized by short life spans, a subset manage to survive over extended periods. Contemporary research on criminal groups has been primarily descriptive and static, leaving important questions on the correlates of group persistence unanswered. Drawing from competing perspectives on the relationship between cohesion and group persistence, the current study applies a longitudinal approach to examine the network dynamics influencing the life span of criminal groups. Nine years of official data on the criminal and social networks of gang-associatess in Montreal is used to delineate criminal group boundaries and examine variation in group duration. Our statistical approach simultaneously considers within and between-group attributes to isolate how groups’ cohesion as well as their embeddedness in the wider gang structure impacts survival. Discrete event history models show that less cohesive groups, and those that form alliances with other groups had longer life spans. The discussion considers the impact of these findings for the continued understanding of group trajectories.
The presentation will start with Martina Catizone and Boyin Yang, Computer Science students at the University of Manchester, giving a short presentation on their projects developing computer-based tools for SNA to explore segregation mechanisms and patterns in society and to study the development of covert networks: optimising secrecy vs efficiency of networks.
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Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester