Dr Svetlana Speight

Dr Svetlana Speight is a Research Director in the Children and Families team. Her main areas of expertise are early years education and childcare, fatherhood, gender roles and time use.  

Svetlana is leading the Study of Early Education and Development (SEED) for the Department for Education (2013-2020). This is a mixed-method evaluation including a longitudinal face-to-face survey of families, a study of quality in early years settings as well as a number of qualitative strands.

Svetlana is a Principal Investigator (PI) on the ESRC-funded study “Changing Patterns in Parental Time Use and their Implications for Parental Wellbeing” (2018-2019). This is a secondary data analysis project using data from the UK Time Use Survey (2000/01, 2014/15). Prior to this project, Svetlana was the PI on the ESRC-funded study "Fathers, work and families in twenty-first century Britain" (2012-2015).

Svetlana's main methodological strengths include substantial experience of designing and implementing large-scale surveys and mixed-method evaluations. She also has advanced skills in using quantitative methods of data analysis.  

In 2006, Svetlana completed a DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford, which compared gender-role attitudes and perceptions of gender inequality in Great Britain and Russia.