The Pre-Defense of Master's Theses for Second-year Students

The second year students of the “Population and Development” master's program recently completed their pre-defense on April 11-13, covering a wide range of topics that reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the program. The committee responsible for evaluating the students' work included professors from the faculty of social sciences, as well as the program's academic supervisor, prof. Alexander Larionov.

While students are making final edits to their works and bringing them to perfection, we decided to find out what research problems our young scientists are most concerned about.

The topics explored by the students were diverse and can be classified into several broad categories: poverty and inequality, demographic researches, public policy and governance, and health and well-being:

• the first category includes research on poverty in Northern Nigeria, as well as work on the relationship between human capital inequality and poverty in post-Soviet states.
• the second category includes themes about the analysis of time series of excess mortality associated with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 39 countries, about internal migration in Russia in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on gender equality in the labor market, and about the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on fertility in the regions of Russia. This category can also be attributed to the block about COVID-19. We see that the relationship between the pandemic and demography attracts a lot of research attention.    
• the third category is the most profile for our educational program and at the same time the largest. The works in this group are devoted to such issues as the role of state policy in relation to the values of creative citizens for the enhancement of creative and cultural industries, evaluation of the effectiveness of state family policy measures in Kazakhstan, the administration systems in the Moscow region, and family planning policy in the context of women's use of modern contraceptives in Nigeria.
• the fourth category is more cross-thematic, because problems from different fields intersect in these works. For example, a study of the impact of urbanization on mental health or the relationship between air pollution and the mental health of the German population.    

Also students are interested in gender inequality, in particular the gender gap in education and the role of gender stereotypes in the enrollment of Nigerian women in STEM education. The interests of the students even touched on the topics of drug policy, coping mechanisms for small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as happiness. Thus, the theme of one of the works is formulated as follows: “The role of mass media in achieving happiness and people-centered development.” 

Summing up, we can say that the pre-defense of master's theses showed the interest of students in complex research problems related to population and development. Pre-defense is an important stage for all students, as it illustrates research progress and provides an opportunity to receive valuable advice and guidance from the members of the commission. We wish our masters success in their further work and look forward to their final defense.