Psychology

My capstone project was a research project that looked at how counseling psychologists could be effective in helping juvenile gang members to leave the gang. The main focus was on the role of the counselor in gang exit strategies and how they could work with other groups such as Law Enforcement and Educators in order to help juvenile gang members to successfully leave the gang. My main conclusion was that counseling psychologists played a critical role in gang exit strategies both by helping former gang members to accept the consequences of gang involvement, and by helping them to develop the skills that they needed in order to survive life outside the gang.

Overall my experience with the project has been successful. In terms of my skills as both a scholar and practitioner my skills have improved in that I have learned to apply research from several different areas to the area that I am studying. This program has also helped me to develop a better understanding of how social changes occur. By learning why some juvenile gang members developed a desire to leave the gang, and what the consequences of both gang membership and leaving the gang were for the individual gang member, I learned why it was necessary to develop stronger programs that help juvenile gang members to exit the gang successfully.

The main difficulty that I encountered during this project was the lack of resources in terms of research studies that had been conducted with juvenile gang members in terms of gang exit strategy. Another major difficulty was that studies that looked at the role of the psychologist in terms of gang exit strategy were few and far between.  My primary recommendation for students participating in this capstone project in the future would be to choose a topic that has a little bit more of a background in terms of available research and literature on the topic that you are trying to study. I would also recommend that you not narrow your focus so much that it makes finding these resources or applying them to your topic of study difficult.