Overcoming Method-Centrism, Volume 1

Jana Uher, PhD, is Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Research, working at the School of Human Sciences, University of Greenwich. She was Senior Research Fellow and Marie Curie Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Jana was the Founder and Director of the Research Group 'Comparative Differential and Personality Psychology' at the Free University Berlin. She has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVAN) in Leipzig and the Humboldt-University of Berlin. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR) in Rome and conducted research projects in the Netherlands, among them at Utrecht University. In her transdisciplinary research, she develops comprehensive philosophy-of-science frameworks for research on individuals that build on, integrate and transcend established paradigms from different sciences (e.g., psychology, physical, medical, social, cultural and life sciences) in order to generate unified knowledge of individuals and their multi-reality 'worlds'. Jana published widely, especially on methodology, the philosophy and theory of methods, and is an expert in measurement and quantification across the sciences. She draws on her empirical experience with a broad portfolio of research methods, including lab-based cognitive experiments, behavioural tests, group observations, in-depth interviews involving first-person videos, standardised and open-ended surveys, audio-visual and computerised methods for detailed behavioural analyses, statistical and psychometric analyses as well as textual and interpretive analyses. Her empirical research involves humans of different socio-cultural backgrounds as well as 10 non-human primate species, especially the great apes and various monkey species. Jana also worked in Human Resources Management in the British headquarters of an international steel-working company as well as in Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) research, especially on software usability (e.g., with Daimler Chrysler). She serves as Associate Editor of various journals, amongst them the Frontiers in Psychology journals Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology and Quantitative Psychology and Measurement, as well as Quality & Quantity; International Journal of Methodology. Jana's research has received several awards and prizes for its originality and intellectual rigor, for addressing fundamental research problems, and for promoting and enabling collaborative research across sciences.