Jim Yocom

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Bio

I am an applied social scientist who helps organizations and the people serving them to ask and answer questions that make a difference.

During and after earning my PhD in sociology, I worked with organizations to shape research questions and analyze data. As an attorney, I focused on supporting nonprofits and small, community-based businesses. While this often involved careful legal structuring, my academic training also allowed me to provide advice grounded in social science.

My mission as an NCSU instructor is to use social science to prepare students for life in organizations fraught with uncertainty and human folly. This often means helping students learn to read and critically evaluate published research—assessing the strength of the methods used and understanding what we know, what we don’t know, and why some questions are hard to answer.

At NCSU I have taught undergraduate courses on Sociology of Law, Sociology of Medicine, Quantitative Data Analysis, Research Methods, Human Behavior, and Survey Design.

Area(s) of Expertise

Research methods; statistics; small groups; laws and norms; the social determinants of health; microsociology and social psychology; attitudes; organizations; survey design and administration; crime, law & deviance; health and mental illness.