Meet the Neet: Adolescent Experimentation at the Edge of Gangs

In this project we study the various psycho-social determinants of adolescent gang entry in Fortaleza and attempt to design multiple interventions which address the various push and pull factors of adolescent gang involvement in this context. Alongside a local NGO, Instituto Favelar, we conducted a survey of 200 households and adolescents to study future perceptions, perceived risk of gang involvement (self and peers), participation in afterschool programs, causal reasoning about environment, and imagery tasks similar to Ashraf et al., 2024, among other modules. We document significant misperceptions among the adolescents in our samples of all norms we elicit in our sample, for instance teens significantly overestimate the share of their peers who plan to drop out, and those that think it's acceptable to join a gang. We also observe very low baseline participation in city-wide after school programs (Cucas) designed to help adolescents stay out of trouble and build skills/aspirations at precisely the time at which they are most at risk of joining violent crime organizations. We attempted various encouragement designs to facilitate enrollment in the Cucas, yet enrollment in the programs remain low across several treatment arms informed by recent adolescent psychology literature. We seek funding to continue developing our project and exploring the viability of alternative interventions. We are in constant communication with city and state officials with whom we will share our current findings and are open to pursuing a full RCT with various city and state programs interested in reducing adolescent gang involvement.