Hanna Feige
About Hanna Feige
Hanna Feige is a doctoral student in Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. She has a background in psychology, with a particular focus on legal and criminal psychology. Her research interests lie at the intersection of psychology, criminology, sociology, and law, with a broader interest in how individuals, institutions, and legal systems understand and respond to crime and victimisation.
Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she was involved in research in legal and criminal psychology. Her previous work includes experimental research on police and investigative interviewing, as well as research on gendered perceptions of violence and victimisation. This work has contributed to her broader interest in legal decision-making, the interpretation of evidence, and the ways in which social and psychological processes shape understandings of crime within and beyond the legal system.
Her doctoral research examines judicial decision-making and reasoning in Swedish rape cases. The project explores how case characteristics relate to legal outcomes and how courts reason about and evaluate evidence, credibility, and reliability. It also examines whether patterns in judicial decision-making differ between courts or have changed over time and in relation to developments in Swedish rape legislation. Drawing on a large corpus of Swedish district and appellate court rulings, the project combines quantitative, computational, and qualitative approaches to identify broader patterns in legal decision-making while also examining how judicial assessments and decisions are constructed and justified in individual cases.
Methodologically, she has experience in quantitative and mixed-methods research. Her work includes statistical analysis and computational approaches to textual data, including natural language processing and machine-learning methods. She is particularly interested in combining computational and quantitative methods with theoretically informed qualitative analysis, allowing complex social and legal phenomena to be studied systematically across large bodies of textual material.
Alongside her doctoral research, she teaches quantitative research methods and criminology at the University of Gothenburg.