Youth street groups and social media: case study about the Latin Kings

Abstract

This is the last report of the project “Virtual ethnography with Latin Kings”, aimed to analyze the presence of this street group on the social media. Our first report provided a background study about how youth street groups are studied online by the scientific community. Our second deliverable consisted of raw data gathered from social media. This last deliverable updates the data previously collected and carries out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data. The main objectives are as follows: first, to detect the social media presence of Latin King members; second, to better understand how Latin Kings use the social media under study; third, to determine how Latin Kings members interact within these social media; and fourth, to ascertain what are the main elements that describe the cultural construction of the Latin Kings through their representations, self-representations and practices on social media. Thus, the study presented here provides an overview of the presence and content generation of the Latin Kings street group in the virtual sphere. In contrast to previous ethnographies with this community, the current approach comes from the knowledge of traditional ethnography that had been done previously by other authors and the principal investigator of the TRANSGANG ERC project in order to add a new layer corresponding to the online realm. A virtual ethnography has been undertaken mixing quantitative and qualitative methods that include social network analysis, computational social science, content analysis and informetrics. This report provides a better understanding of the Latin King community by analyzing social media content in which they actively decided to be involved, in contrast to traditional media content portrayals. Our first approach to the study of youth street groups online offers a system and method of analysis that allows us to find identity traces and communicative trends among the Latin King community in Youtube. Although the procedure can be refined and extended to other contexts (countries and social media platforms), we believe that it points in the right direction to a non-criminalized approach to the study of youth street groups online and that we have faced some of the challenges previously detected. The findings obtained should be of interest to gang scholars and contribute to furthering knowledge in the research area.