Philosophy and Goals

The graduate program in the Department of Human Development & Family Studies is focused on development across the full lifespan, as it occurs in specific social, cultural, historical, and physical settings. In short, we are concerned with development in real life.

This focus leads naturally to a concern with contexts themselves, to a focus on the systemic aspects of person, family, and the developmental process. Thus we are concerned with theories of development and context, and on testing those theories in a systematic way.

We are also concerned with the action implications of our views. Some among us are involved in treatment and preventive interventions. Others contribute to the formulation and evaluation of social and administrative policies that affect families and individual development. Still others focus on training others in effective and efficient provision of human services.

At the same time, we know that the process of scientific discovery must be free to follow its own logical and serendipitous course, regardless of immediate application. Intellectual curiosity for its own sake is part of what we hope to foster in all our students, future practitioners as well as future scientists. Both types will profit from an awareness that the shortest distance between two points--in the real world--is not necessarily a straight line, but might involve some apparently irrelevant intellectual and empirical wandering, an investment as it were in a context of scholarship.