Idiographic-Nomothetic

• Idiographic: The idiographic approach in psychology focuses on understanding individuals in their unique context. It aims to uncover specific, individualized factors and experiences that contribute to a person’s behavior and psychological functioning, using qualitative methods and in-depth analysis to gain rich insights into individual lives.
• The idiographic approach tends to include qualitative data, investigating individuals in a personal and detailed way.Methods of research include case studies, unstructured interviews, self-reports, autobiographies, and personal documents.
• The nomothetic approach emphasizes the importance of identifying universal patterns and relationships among people's behaviors, thoughts, emotions, and physiological responses. By studying these commonalities, researchers hope to develop theories and interventions that apply broadly to many individuals rather than just one.
• Nomothetic: Nomothetic approaches are based on the idea that there is an underlying structure or pattern to human behavior that can be identified through quantitative research methods such as surveys, experiments, and statistical analyses. This approach seeks to identify general laws or principles governing human behavior across different populations and situations.
• Humanistic psychologists were only interested in documenting the conscious experience of the individual and described themselves as ‘anti-scientific’ and more interested in describing unique experiences than making general laws.Psychodynamic approach takes an idiographic approach = Freud used less than 20 case studies to develop his theories, he used these as universal explanations of personality and abnormality.
• Behaviourists are nomothetic approaches. Skinner developed operant conditioning with the use of rats and applied these to humans. Miller studied memory in a lab and inferred from this that we have a capacity of 7+/-2 items. Biological approach conducts brain scans as part of its research and uses this to make general laws about what biological factors cause certain behaviours, such as schizophrenia.
• P: The idiographic approach uses in-depth qualitative methods of investigation.

  E: Such investigations provide a complete account of the individual which may in fact shed further light on already established laws, or challenge such laws. E.g. the case of HM which gave enormous

  insight into memory function.

  E: This suggests that the idiographic approach may contribute to our overall understanding of a topic area.
• P: On the other hand, this approach can result in a narrow and restricted view on behaviour.

  E: Approaches such as the psychodynamic approach were developed after studying less than 20 case studies. Concepts such as the Oedipus complex were developed after only 1 case study (Little Hans).

  E: This suggests that the approach does not generate enough scientific data from which we can draw objective conclusions. However, despite adopting a largely idiographic approach, the psychodynamic approach does attempt to generate general laws of behaviour, suggesting it incorporates both elements
• P: The processes involved in the nomothetic approach tend to be more scientific.

  E: The approach uses methods similar to the natural sciences, testing in standardised settings generating data that produces averages and can be statistically analysed. Research in areas such as cognitive psychology and memory use lab experiments where variables are manipulated in order to establish cause and effect.

  E: This means that psychologists have been able to establish ‘norms’, such as average capacity of memory and why some mental disorders may occur, which can lead to practical applications.
• Rather than seeing nomothetic and idiographic approaches as being either/or, an alternative way is to consider the same topic from both perspectives. The goal of modern psychology is to try and provide rich, detailed descriptions of human behaviour as well as being able to generalise these descriptions and make general laws.
• The nomothetic approach seeks standardised methods of assessing people. This ensures true replication occurs across samples of behaviour and removes the contaminating influence of bias. The idiographic approach tends not to believe that objectivity is possible in psychological research. It is people's individual experience of their unique context that is important.