<p>Oh dear - I can’t imagine anyone “falling in love” with the life of a grad student. I guess the grass is always greener, but I think that people often have this idyllic idea of being in graduate school that’s not actually remotely close to true when they get here. (I’m a fifth year PhD student, for context.) And I definitely don’t recommend going to graduate school just because you want the “lifestyle.” You can learn new things without being in a formal program, and even without taking classes. Continuing to stay in school just because you’ve always taken classes is foolish. Eventually you won’t take classes anymore; find other ways to engage your intellect.</p>
<p>In addition, if you are still wondering about what field to go into, then you probably aren’t really ready to go back to graduate school. Take some more time to think about what you actually want to do. You get a graduate degree with the idea in mind that you are aiming for a certain field of work, not just to go. You also don’t choose programs (particularly PhD programs) based on location, but based upon who works there and can be your mentor and foster your research career. The best person for your interests may be at Michigan, or Kansas, or Indiana!</p>
<p>But to answer the central question, in psychology the subfields don’t have clear lines of demarcation. What subfield you choose is partially based on your research interests, but also partially based on the resources particular programs have. One professor once told me that you can answer a particular research question in a variety of fields, but what will change based on your field is your approach to the problem. For example, for the question about how behavior affects mental health, an anthropologist might use culture as the lens through which they examine the question and use ethnographic field methods to investigate the answer; a sociologist may be interested in social movements and use interviews or mixed-methods; a psychologist may be more interested in interpersonal social interactions and do experiments; an epidemiologist may use large national datasets collected from a representative sample of the country. They can all answer the question, just in different ways.</p>
<p>Your interests are incredibly broad, and not all within developmental psychology. The “outcome of one’s development as a child” encompasses so many, many different areas. How that outcome affects them in different situations is something else entirely. You’ll need to narrow down your interests, for one.</p>
<p>However, there’s nothing preventing you from applying to both social and developmental programs, depending on who does research there and what kinds of resources there are. You may find a department where a social psychologist has developmental interests and is doing pretty much exactly what you want to do, and then you collaborate with other mentors in a developmental program. Maybe you do your PhD in developmental psychology and your postdoc in social psychology. Or maybe your interests take you somewhere else - for example, if you are interested in cognitive development you may choose a cognitive psychology program; if you are interested in the development of child mental disorders a child clinical program may be perfect for you; if you are interested in the impact of community on a child’s development, then you may be interested in community psychology; and if you are interested in the impact of school and educational processes on a child, then school or educational psychology may be the way to go. School psychology also has the added benefit of giving you a license to do practice work, if you so desire. You may also go afield from psychology, and determine that social work is what you really want to do - researchers in social work also do child development work!</p>
<p>Basically, it’s impossible to answer this question with the information given. To summarize:</p>
<ol>
<li>Don’t go to graduate school just because you like learning and you’re bored. Go because you have a specific goal: you want to be a researcher (in the case of a PhD), or you want a master’s that will help lead you to a job.</li>
<li>The lifestyle of a grad student is probably nowhere near as glamorous as you are imagining. Talk to some grad students and they will tell you.</li>
<li>Whatever subfield you decide doesn’t matter, as long as you can get what you want accomplished. Choose a subfield based on the approach they take and the tools you want to learn.</li>
</ol>