Spencer James

Spencer L. James is a Professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University, where he serves as coordinator of the Africana Studies program at the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies and as a Fellow at both the Wheatley Institute and the Ballard Center for Social Impact. A sociologist and demographer by training, he studies how family structures and relationship dynamics shape the well-being of children, adolescents, and adults worldwide, as well as the societies in which they live.

He is the founder and director of BYU’s Global Families Research Initiative (globalfamilies.byu.edu), which collects and disseminates global data on family and child well-being, producing accessible reports and country profiles to inform scholars, policymakers, and the public about global family trends—especially in under-researched regions of the world. He recently served as a 2023–24 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Parakou in Benin. Since joining BYU in 2012, he has published more than fifty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, along with a number of public and technical reports. His scholarship appears in leading outlets such as Journal of Marriage and Family (where he currently serves as an associate editor), Social Forces, Family Relations, and Social Science Research.

He teaches courses on research methods, statistics, and global family patterns and is an affiliate faculty member in Global Women’s Studies, International Development, and Canadian Studies. His ongoing projects investigate links between family dynamics and child wellbeing throughout the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, and develop internationally comparable measures of family well-being.