Professor of Social Work
Associate Dean for Research
Co-Director, Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health
NYU Silver School of Social Work
New York University
Email: jj76@nyu.edu
Dr. James Jaccard is currently Professor of Social Work, Associate Dean for Research, and Co-Director of the Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1976. Previously, he was the Director of the Institute for Child Health and Development at Florida International University in Miami, and a Distinguished Research Professor at the State University of New York in Albany, where he had appointments in both the department of psychology and the School of Social Welfare.
Dr. Jaccard was trained as a psychologist with specialties in attitude change and decision making. His research focuses on adolescent problem behaviors related to unintended pregnancy and substance use. He has developed parent-based interventions to teach parents how to communicate more effectively and parent their adolescent so as to reduce the risk of unintended pregnancies and problems due to substance use. He was involved in the seminal work on the influential Theory of Reasoned Action. Dr. Jaccard 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 panel design. Add Health is one of the largest and most influential secondary databases on adolescent health in the United States.