• MA Degree Requirements
• PhD Degree Requirements
• Curriculum

The Human Development and Social Policy Program (HDSP) focuses on development from infancy through adulthood, with an emphasis on understanding the role of the contexts, policies and politics that shape and distribute life chances.

Over the life course, people learn, develop, and interact within families, communities, schools, workplaces, and the political and economic orders within which their lives are embedded and defined. The overarching aim of scholarship in Human Development and Social Policy is to improve human lives by examining and understanding how policies affect the lives of people through the life course and how people can analyze and affect policy. It does so by promoting an interdisciplinary understanding of how people develop, how various experiences and contexts affect human lives, the underlying logic of program design and evaluation, the ways in which political agendas are set, and how political forces distribute opportunities in a democracy.

The core curriculum in HDSP provides training in human development, qualitative and quantitative methods, and in policy development, implementation and evaluation. Students then specialize in such areas as child development and and social policy, adult development and social policy, or human development and education policy.

Depending on their specializations, students receive training for jobs in human development, education, social ecology and family studies programs, for positions as development specialists in public policy schools and in research and evaluation firms, and for employment in family and child evaluation units in federal and state governments.

Applicants should contact the program or see Web site www.sesp.northwestern.edu/hdsp to learn about program-specific requirements for admission.

Faculty

The primary appointment for those faculty with joint or affiliate status in another program is noted in parentheses.