Tierra's Case Summary

According to the United States census bureau, in 2013 45.3 million Americans were below the poverty line. Those who are under the age of 18 are the largest portions of those in poverty. Individuals who are in poverty are a huge cost to society because of increased health care, lost productivity, and crime. More so, children who grow up in poverty are more likely to do very poor in school and have low academic performance scores than their other peers, which can lead them to fewer opportunities in their near future. Children are more prone to negative adulthood outcome if he or she experience poverty doing childhood situations that are taking place during that time. Children who are living in poverty stricken neighborhoods are less likely
to have access to resources that they need to help them further their education in without the proper resources it could lead to a major decline in school enrollments. In a case scenario, there is a 15-year-old girl name Tierra, who just recently gave birth to four month-year-old, Ky.
Tierra lives with her mother who is a single parent of three. Tierra had to drop out of school because she had no one to watch her baby, her mother couldn't watch her baby because she is too busy making ends meet for her three children and now she has to feed yet another mouth. Tierra did not know any better and tried to apply for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) but her mother was already on there and it was in her address. Tierra gets approved for her snap benefits but her mother snap benefits gets cut off. With only one source of income and $100 a month from the government, Tierra had no choice but to rob a local gas station to try to come up with some easy money. Tierra thinking she could get away with, got caught and was sentenced to five years in jail which lead to having her mother putting her baby up for adoption because she could not take care of him if she's at work majority of the time. Which leads to my research question, Does children who grows up in poverty, are more likely to commit crimes during youth
adulthood. It is in my belief that, growing up in poverty has a huge effect on young adults mental state, which can cause for unstable environments that will lead to crime. I feel that there are other factors that come with crime, yet in my opinion poverty plays a major part. When doing my research, I came across many definitions of what is poverty. For the purposes of this research I define poverty as, students who goes to an alternative high school, that’s on the road to committing crime The method I will be using to conduct this research is quantitative data.
I will be surveying 500 students. 250 alternative high school students and 250 charter high school students, between the ages of 18-19, because it would be easier for them to participate in this design without parental control. I will be specifically doing this research in the Lawndale area, on the west side of Chicago. Personally me growing up in Chicago I have knowledge about this area, because this is where there are single-family households, low income, and lots of crime take place here. I have two purposes for using surveys. The first purpose is to get the public opinions (students) on dealing with poverty crime to help improve some of the difficult defects that exist within those main areas. Another reason why I chose surveys is so that I can reach out to different high schools, where I can get the younger population educated on, crime and how not to let it affect them. Also, there were three different surveys that I had to choose for my research proposal, which were questionnaires, mailed surveys, and telephone surveys. I decided to use questionnaires. I will be asking a series of questions related to both property crimes and serious violent crimes they had committed in the past year. First, students were asked 3 questions related to property crimes. “In the past year, how many times did you want to steal something for your local mall”? 0 = never, 1 = 1-2 times, 2 = 3-4 times, and 3 = 5 or
more times. Next I will be asking, “In the past year how often did you want break in a house to steal something?” 0 = never, 1 = 1-2 times, 2 = 3-4 times, and 3 = 5 or more times. The last question that I will ask is “how often did you want to sell or buy stolen property in the past year?” with 0 = never, 1 = 1-2 times, 2 = 3-4 times, and 3 = 5 or more times. To measure violent crimes, students were asked “in the past year, how often did you threaten someone to get something from them?” 0 = never, 1 = 1-2 times, 2 = 3-4 times, and 3 = 5 or more times. They then were asked, “How often did you want to use weapon in a fight, if you’ve been in a fight?” 0 = never, 1 = 1-2 times, 2 = 3-4 times, and 3 = 5 or more times. As a final measure for violent crime, students were asked, “ if in a physical fight, how often do you want to hurt someone, where you would want to send them to the hospital?” 0 = never, 1 = 1-2 times, 2 = 3-4 times, and 3 = 5 or more times.
The next thing that is going to be done is comparing my control group and my treatment group. My control group is the charter school students and my treatment group is the student who goes to an alternative high school. When I have the information I need I will sort the papers of questions into two piles to see which students from different schools scores the highest overall when determining who are more likely to commit crimes during adult hood. My research method is appropriate for my research question because, it shows the correlation between students who live in stricken poverty neighborhoods, are the ones that are more likely to commit crimes during adulthood. In conclusion, my main concerns in conducting this research, is ethical issues. I will need to make sure that these students are safe to want to open up to me, so my biggest concern is ensuring confidentiality. And I will do this by making sure no one has access to this information but the researcher, and not sharing information to others, because if this happens to get out, it can cause much stress and pain on the students who are at risk of committing crimes, and they might actually commit one due to the embarrassment of their peers.