Social Policy and Social Research — Ph.D. with Bioethics — M.A.

Program director, Bioethics

Zdravko Plantak

Program director, Social Policy and Social Research, Department of Social Work and Social Ecology

Larry Ortiz

Faculty

The faculty for the combined degrees Bioethics with Social Policy and Social Research Program is drawn from the School of Religion and from the Department of Social Work and Social Ecology in the School of Behavioral Health.

Purpose of the program

The purpose of the M.A./Ph.D. combined degrees Bioethics with Social Policy and Social Research Program is to facilitate an integrated and more efficient completion of two graduate degrees for students with strong interests in both bioethics and social policy. Students who complete this combined degrees program will be prepared to make significant interdisciplinary contributions to the field of social policy and ethics. Individuals working in the area of social policy must be able to undertake and publish research on social problems. This requires the ability to apply ethical theory to real-world policy scenarios. Graduates will be able to provide leadership to the social policy arena by conducting interdisciplinary research on various issues and agendas that have significant moral implications.

Admissions

To enter the proposed program, students must gain separate acceptance to both graduate programs.  The Social Policy and Social Research Program director recommends students. These recommendations trigger a streamlined admissions process for the M.A. degree in bioethics.

Course work requirements

If an M.A. degree in bioethics is taken as a stand-alone degree, the requirement is 48 units. However, the M.A./Ph.D. combined degrees student is able to double count 20 of the needed 48 units as follows:

1. 16 units from four courses in the social policy curriculum count toward the M.A. degree in bioethics requirements because of their similarity to ethics-type courses. Those courses are SPOL 613 Social Science Concepts I, SPOL 614 Social Science Concepts II, SPOL 615 Economic Theory and Social Policy, and SPOL 655 Research Methods II. These four courses have sufficiently similar content to bioethics that they warrant being applied to both the bioethics M.A. degree curriculum and the Ph.D. degree in social policy curriculum.
2. 3 units come from one bioethics course in the social policy curriculum that is already required: RELE 588 Explorers of the Moral Life

To the extent possible, research projects in both programs focus on the interface of ethics and social policy.