Fellows

James Jaccard, PhD

Active | Inducted in 2016

Bio

Dr. James Jaccard is a Professor Emeritus of Social Work at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. He received his doctorate from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1976. Dr. Jaccard was initially trained as a psychologist with specialties in attitude change and decision making, but later expanded his research to embrace social work. His research focuses on the prevention of adolescent and young adult problem behaviors, particularly those related to unintended pregnancy and substance use. He has developed parent-based interventions to teach parents how to more effectively communicate and parent their adolescent children so as to reduce the risk of unintended pregnancies and problems due to substance use. He was one of the designers of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), which interviewed over 20,000 adolescents and their mothers in a multi-wave wave panel design. Add Health is one of the largest and most influential secondary databases on adolescent health in the United States.

Dr. Jaccard also has an extensive background in psychometrics and statistical methods. He has written numerous books and articles on the analysis of interaction effects in statistical models, and has written several influential articles on arbitrary metrics in social science research. Dr. Jaccard also has written about theory construction and how to build conceptual models.  He gave the Aaron Rosen Lecture in 2016 at SSWR and is among the top 1% cited researchers in social work and in psychology
To access, Dr. Jaccards’ Faculty Page, click here: NYU, Silver School of Social Work.