Current research interests

Diane is currently Research Fellow at the Manchester Business School, continuing her commitment to health research with this project on the impact of e-health information and technologies on the delivery of healthcare.  Diane’s research speciality is in qualitative research methods, including ethnographic observations, interviewing, case studies and discourse analysis.  Diane has worked with health care professionals for thirty years in a variety of contexts, as both an allied health professional and through research projects she has been engaged with.

Qualifications

• 1972 - BA SUNY @ Stony Brook, NY (USA), Psychology
• 1994 - MA New York University, NY (USA), Applied Psychology
• 1999 - MA (Econ) University of Manchester, UK, Social Research Methods
• 2002 - PhD University of Manchester, UK, Women’s Studies/Sociology  
  

Selected publications

• Speier, DS (2004) ‘Becoming a Mother’. In O’Reilly, A (Ed), Mother Matters: Motherhood as Discourse and Practice, Toronto, Association for Research on Mothering, pp.141-153.
• Speier, DS (2001) ‘Becoming A Mother’. Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Spring/Summer, Volume 3, Number 1, pp. 7-18

Projects worked on

Diane has previously worked as a Research Associate at the School for Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at the University of Sheffield on two projects. One project was a randomised controlled trial on psychological interventions for postnatal depression, and the second project was the development of a postnatal health instrument for women and their partners.

Prior to her research work at the University of Sheffield, Diane’s doctoral research at the University of Manchester was a retrospective ethnography of her professional practice, using the case notes from her practice (as an allied health professional) as the data. Diane also conducted a case study of midwifery for her master’s dissertation while she was preparing for her PhD research.