Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader For A Day

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In Sudhir Venkatesh’s ethnography Gang Leader for a Day, is his research is through the University of Chicago in the 1990s and chose to do research on poor black people. He stated about his experience with JT in the Robert Taylor Housing and to understand how their life if differentiates from others. Throughout this paper I will be speaking about Venkatesh’s research, the limitation, my opinion in how Venkatesh understood all of his findings, and how his experience mesh with my own. The novel is his dissertation, his ethnography where he collected data record their observations, and find a way to understand the meaning behind it all. To begin, Venkatesh used both quantitative and qualitative research. He first used quantitative which is when a researcher collects data numerically, finding …show more content…

Through out the novel there was support from everyone. Fellow residents supported each other, if something happened to someone everyone will have their back. But, a few barriers that the residents faced were that there was a gang controlling their building. Some support that the residents got from the gang was that they were insured protection (84). The residents of the RTH felt afraid with the presence of the gang because it attracted other gangs and the gangs also take tax from the residents and if not paid there are consequences. Brass, a resident of RTH, got beat up by JT because Brass did not pay the money and went against the rules of the gang (71). This is only one consequence that could occur, there are many others. Lastly, gang activity was seen as a viable option for the youth because many kids may had dropped out or/and had nothing to do for days; so being apart of a gang may have made them feel accepted into a

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