Veenkatesh Gang Leader

Gang Leader for A Day Response Paper “Just another day as an outsider looking at life from the inside”, says Sudhir Venkatesh ,referring to his involvement in his research study. Venkatesh is a self proclaimed “rogue sociologist” who wanted to study the lives of poor black families living in Chicago. Instead of solely conducting interviews and surveys, Venkatesh took it a step further and immersed himself in the environment that he was studying. Gang Leader for A Day describes Venkatesh’s experiences with the Black Kings, and ultimately explores gang life through a lens that not many would be willing to adopt. The methods and techniques that were used in both of the research projects were actually very similar. In Venkatesh’s study, he

He adopted an etic approach, because he was not part of the community that he was studying this. He becomes aware of this after J.T. asks him “how’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” (Venkatesh 16). J.T. essentially makes it clear to Sudhir that the only way that he will understand the lives of these black families is by becoming involved in the community. The initial failure of his survey highlights the importance of Venkatesh’s shift from using an etic approach to an emic approach. Venkatesh begins to immerse himself within the Robert Taylor community, using the snowball sampling method. This is evident when Sudhir meets Clarisse, a cousin of J.T. She informs him about the type of people that live in the building, saying that “Regulars like me, we hustle to make our money, but we only go with guys we know. We don’t do it full time… then you got hypes that are just in i for the drugs. They don’t live around here, but J.T. lets them work here..” (Venkatesh 56). This would later lead to Venkatesh associating with these individuals in order to learn more about the reasons why they’re involved with prostitution, or drugs. If Venkatesh hadn’t adopted these approaches, then he would have had far less data to work