Purpose & Necessity
[Purpose]

"Infant abuse", "childcare uneasiness", "degeneration of communication", "disordered class", "decrease of academic ability", " increase in part-time job employees", "increase in persons of middle age divorce and suicide", "empty nest syndrome", "euthanasia and death with dignity", and "development, expansion of the social gap in life"... Such social problems are causing distortion of this society. We try to deal with these problems through human development sciences.

  1. Investigation of development process life
    It does not focus only on a specific developmental stage, but on the perspective of a long-term life span from "birth" to "death".
  2. Vertical section-pursuit research
    Considering the development process of an "individual" or a "group" not as a set of point on a time-axis, but on a line-axis.
  3. Interdisciplinary
    In order to understand the varieties of human development, in fields such as a psychology, educational science, family (household economy) theory, social security theory, and cultural anthropology, wide range society and cultural space are treated by various methods.
  4. Integration through the approach of behavioral science and brain science
    Investigation of human development is not only being done by behavioral data, but also by the cranial nerve scientific data.

The purpose of this base is to build a whole life development research center which covers the development as a time-axis from "birth" to "death"; puts a home, a school, a place of work, or various cultures into a view to respond to the above-mentioned request; and treats from human action to cranial nerve science in order to deal with the contemporary problem of human development.
[[Relevance to the University's Future]
 Ochanomizu University aims at becoming the base of the female researcher in Asia. In the field of research which can respond to the above mentioned points, "human development science" course is the only research base in Asia, and the contribution of female researchers to the world is expected.
[Feature]
  • Diversity
    The greatest features of this base are the members and their diversity. It consists of variegated specialist groups in order to cover the diversity of "human development" topics.
  • Uniqueness
    It is the only base of "the human development science" which can respond to all the above requests in the world.
  • Fusion of theory and practice
    The organization of this base uses "human development science" course as a core; cooperates with "child's development research center", "attached school garden", "development clinical consultation room" inside the university; Hitachi Central Research Laboratory and Tamagawa University brain science research institution outside the university; Louis Pasteur university (France) etc. overseas, consists of both theory and practice.
[Present condition & Tendency ]
The base of "human development" was also established by University of Minnesota Institute of Child Development, University of California Riverside school Center for Family Studies etc. Projects of several researches, for example University of Chicago National Opinion Research "High School & Beyond", University of California "FAMILY FIRST" etc. are well-known.
However, the research of each of these centers and projects focus only on developmental process from infants to adolescence. In Asia, there is no research base on "human development". In Japan, although there are many universities of educational science that do researches on "human development", there are only a few places that are also researching from the point of developmental psychology and also put elderly people into the view. These few researches have not resulted in the formation of a base.
[Expected Achievements]
  • Creation of a suitable diagnosis and prescription for coping with the critical situations relevant to today's "human development".
  • Reaching the level of international bases and to serve as a global research base.
  • Acquiring political scientific knowledge from the viewpoint of the socially weak to social trends, such as capability and gap expansion between the social classes in employment opportunity and life opportunity.
  • Becoming the new local approaching type base which does not only carry out information dispatch as a global research base, but also collects familiar voice and problems by cooperating with an area or an attached school garden.
  • Expecting of a strengthened educational system and appearing of female researchers in great numbers as a result of research guidance from various fields.