This article examines gang membership through a life-course lens. The life-course approach looks at how events in an individual's life history affect that person's future decisions and actions. Results are presented for: the correlates of gang membership in a national sample; the age-graded prevalence of gang membership; distinct pathways of gang membership in the life-course; and correlates of gang membership pathways. This study's findings "demonstrate that gang membership is strongly age-graded, much like criminal offending ... While gang membership is overwhelmingly an adolescence-oriented phenomenon, the findings indicate that youth cycle in and out of gangs at distinct points in the life-course" (p. 366).
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