James Shockey

Jim Shockey is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology, and previously served as Associate Dean in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and as Dean of the University of Arizona’s branch campus--UA South.  His academic interests include demography; statistics and research methods; sociology of the labor force, and social-psychological aspects of families and parenting. 

Shockey’s current work seeks to extend his prior work on family structure to understand the relationship between expenditures on children, parental behavior and lifestyle characteristics, and ultimately examine differences in child costs by families of varying compositions.  An important component will be an exploration of gene-environment interactions and their impact on individual and family resilience, with the potential to inform strategies to reduce social outcomes such as school performance, health, obesity, substance abuse, and delinquency.  He is also developing a growing interest in “cyber sociology,” including social aspects of differential access, use and security in the cyber world (including cyber security, the exploding growth of the “internet of things”).