Jeffrey Boase

Jeffrey Boase holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He spent a year at the Harvard Kennedy School on a predoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Digital Government. After completing his PhD, he spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Psychology at The University of Tokyo.

Professor Boases’s research focuses on the relationship between communication technology and personal networks. He is particularly interested in how emerging technologies such as smartphones and social media platforms may enable or hinder the transfer of information and support within personal networks. His research takes an international approach to this topic by examining and comparing personal networks and technology use in several countries, primarily Japan, the US, and Canada. In recent years he has incorporated digital trace data (so-called “Big Data”) into project designs, merging it with more traditional survey and interview data.