MSc Demography & Health (online)

Ageing populations, shifting fertility rates, migration, growing inequalities - these are the demographic forces driving today’s global headlines. Population dynamics affect every aspect of our world, from political stability and climate impact to economies, health, and family life. As the data landscape continues to evolve, new avenues for digital demographic research are emerging. Expert demographers are crucial for generating the population insights that shape global trends and for driving innovation in demographic data science with tangible, real-world benefits.

Join our online MSc Demography and Health to study population dynamics and their interaction with global health. This is an intensive online programme that can be taken either full time (one year) or built to work alongside your employment part-time over two years. You’ll learn to analyse processes that govern and interact with population change, including reproductive behaviour and social relationships, exposure to health risks, economic growth, and climate change.

This programme is also available on campus.

What you will learn

• Learn demographic methods and theory, including population projections; dynamics of fertility, mortality and migration; data science and analytics; life-course research and survival analysis
• Learn to present results of analyses through written and oral presentations
• Take a critical, interdisciplinary approach to the study of population change and its interactions with wider social, political and environmental change
• Discover how we can use evidence-based approaches to develop and evaluate population programmes
• Formulate critical, policy-relevant, research questions and use demographic and health data to address them
• Develop practical skills through student-led seminars, data analysis tasks and mini-research projects

Understand how to analyse and exploit emerging data sources to unravel contemporary population dynamics and their interactions with social, economic and environmental change. You will also learn how to conduct demographic research in situations where data are lacking. Our Population Studies Group has expertise pioneering demographic methods where data are scarce or unreliable in a wide variety of settings.

You’ll be taught by demographers, social scientists, and reproductive health specialists and you will be welcomed into a dynamic research group who are committed to demography training. Hear about their specialist research on everything from improving mortality data collection in pandemics, to evolutionary and anthropological demography, to the relationship between violence and fertility, as well as from a range of external speakers working in the population field.

With a choice of modules, you’ll be able to shape your study to suit your interests. Perhaps you’ll find a passion for population projections under different scenarios. Or maybe you’ll be interested in critically appraising population policies or studying how population interacts with climate change. Your research project will give you a chance to examine an area in more depth. Past students have explored topics such as the demographic impact of climate change in the Gambia, migration from Mexico, spatial analysis of infant mortality in Victorian London, sexual and reproductive health in Tanzania, and interactions between ageing and employment in the UK.