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Copyright of Boletín Criminológico is the property of Instituto Andaluz Interuniversitario de Criminologia (Seccion Malaga) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Investigacion Criminologica is the property of Revista Espanola de Investigacion Criminologica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article can be considered part of narrative criminology and explores narratives as sites where complex processes of identity construction take place. This analysis uses the notion of positioning (Bamberg, 1997; Davies and Harré, 1990; Wortham 2000) to evaluate some of the discursive processes through which the construction of identities and the self takes place in interview contexts with deviant subjects. The main interest of this work revolves around the ways in which offenders position themselves in relation to the characters who are part of the stories they narrate (positioning level 1), with respect to their interviewer (positioning level 2) and in terms of socially and culturally disseminated discourses (positioning level 3). What is significant about these levels of narrative positioning is that they offer the opportunity for these subjects to negotiate the identity or the type of image they want to give of themselves in a given place and time. Thus, based on data from a corpus of interviews with Venezuelan murderers, we analyze the experience of a subject convicted of attempted murder his mistress, who adopts very different positionings with respect to himself, his victim, family and work experience. In particular, through the strategies of categorization and indexicality we explore how he describes, defines and positions himself and the other characters in his narratives, which makes it possible to understand the self and identity (conventional and deviant) present in the narrated events (story world), in the narrative activity that materializes in the interview (narrative world) and in a broader world that involves socio-cultural aspects. In the end, this positioning analysis shows how complexly identities are related to belonging to deviant and conventional contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing valid measures of gang membership for self-report surveys is a challenging task in comparative cross-national research. In this article, we use the Venezuelan case to assess the validity of the Eurogang indicators of gang membership. Based on focus groups with adolescents and the results from two sweeps of the International Self-Report Survey of Juvenile Delinquency, we identify problems in the content and construct validities of the Eurogang items. We propose an alternative set of measures for cross-national studies of gang membership, focusing on a group’s reputation for violence (or broader criminal behaviour). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of URVIO - Revista Latinoamericana de Seguridad Ciudadana is the property of FLACSO - Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)