Dr Hannah Chiswell

Biography

Hannah is a social scientist researching farmers’ and fishers’ decision-making, particularly in response to policy changes. Often using social-psychology approaches, her work explores the factors shaping behaviour in rural communities and their implications for the environment. She has a sustained track record in agri-environment scheme (AES) design research, including scheme evaluation.

Hannah also has a particular interest in the mental health and well-being of rural communities and the intersections between social and policy contexts, community resilience and lived experience. Hannah is committed to co-production approaches to research that involve communities and often works as part of interdisciplinary teams. To date, she has worked with a range of clients including Defra, Natural England and the EU commission.

Hannah is the CCRI ethics lead, and has been a member of the University’s Research Ethics Committee since 2021. She also acts as an independent ethics adviser on different projects, and is open to enquiries from those requiring independent ethics advice. Hannah has also acted as a reviewer for multiple rounds of the UK Seafood Fund, Defra-funded research outputs, Lumivero Early Career Grant applications and regularly peer reviews for academic journals in her field.

Hannah describes herself as a mixed methods researcher; originally a qualitative specialist, she is now competent in a range of quantitative methods using platforms such as R and SPSS. She is a ‘certified expert’ of qualitative analysis software, NVivo, a certified user of ESRI ArcGIS, and graduated from an intensive ‘R in 3 months’ in 2024. Hannah holds PRINCE2 foundation and APM (project fundamentals) project management certificates. She has a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PgCAP) and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

Qualifications

• PhD: Politics, University of Exeter: ‘Rising to the Food Security Challenge: An Investigation into Family Farm Succession in the South West of England’, University of Exeter, 2014
• PCAP, Academic Practice, University of Exeter, 2018
• BA (Hons): Geography, University of Plymouth, 2010

Accreditation

QSR NVivo – ‘Certified Expert’

ESRI Certified – Arc-GIS Desktop entry

Exegesis Q-GIS introduction

R in 3 Months

Membership of professional bodies

Member European Society for Rural Sociology

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy