Jean Yeung has almost 20 years of university teaching and research experience up her sleeve. She joined the department and ARI last year (summer) and started working on her project on demographic surveys in China and India. Couched on the fact that these two countries have become the recent boom towns, the study, according to her, will take advantage of her previous experience in studying families and incomes across the United States. Previously, she worked at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and transferred to New York University later on.

Her experience in large-scale longitudinal studies brings to our department a perspective that some of us are quite guilty in neglecting – that of quantitative sociology. She shared her thoughts regarding this perspective and methodology – an imbalance on quantitative methodologies can be quite a handicap especially in a world where numbers matter (let’s face it, most institutions ‘out there’ just love dealing with numbers). Prof. Yeung lamented that whenever you pull out a journal article, say from the American Sociological Review, you’re bound to encounter an article that’s written and framed in quantitative methodologies. The sad part, she said, is that a student of sociology would likely not be able to comprehend a single thing about a table that talks about social phenomenon X, discussed over a longitudinal fashion or that which applies multiple regression analysis. It’s not that she thinks quantitative methodologies are the most important of all sociological methodologies, no. She thinks that we, as sociologists, must have at least a basic understanding of these things.

On a lighter note, Jean Yeung has finally settled in. She said that she’s finally gotten used to the temperature and can now sleep peacefully at night. Her husband works in NUS Biz, and they have 2 kids – an NYU student who’s in his final semester, and a daughter who’s busy doing prep work for uni entrance tests. Jean Yeung looks forward to get into the thick of her research soon.