idiographic and nomothetic approaches

• idiographic approach 


  a method of investigating behaviour which focuses on individuals and emphasises their uniqueness. no aim of developing general principles and unifying laws

  HM or KF
• the psychodynamic approach 


  example of ideographic approach

  freud used case studies and in depth interviews to collect qualitative data

  freud also established his psychosexual stages arguing all children pass through these- nomeothetic approach
• humanistic approach 


  example of ideographic approach

  holistic and phenomenological approach to research focus on experience of the individual

  client centered approach to therapy and maslows hierarchy of needs
• nomeothetic approach 


  seeks to formulate general laws based on the studies of groups and the use of statistical, qualitative techniques (scientific)

  radford and kirby general laws:

  • classifying people into groups
  • establishing principles that can be applied to people in general
  • establishing dimensions along which people can be placed, compared and measured
• examples of the nomothetic approach

  • biological approach makes use of brain scans to determine brain function- use of PET scans by tulving at al- semantic memory in left prefrontal cortex
  • cognitive approach uses objective measures of measuring brain activity- allows interferences to be drawn about mental processes
  • behaviourists explain all behaviour in terms of simple stimulus response links learnt from experience- collect lab data with strict control of extraneous and confounding variables. allows for cause and effect
• evaluation of the ideographic approach

  + qualitative data produces an in-depth and more complete account of an individual- HM and clive wearing both suffered LTM loss but had different areas affected- led to more research and improved theories

  -narrow and restricted perspective- case studies are hard to generalise beyond the individual

  -the research methods used are unstructured interviews, lack scientific rigor- rely heavily on individual interpretation so conclusions are open to bias
• nomothetic approach evaluation 


  +nomothetic and idiographic approaches may complement each other- milton and davis 1996- nomothetic approaches should then be ideographically applied to individuals

  +highly scientific method-uses standardised procedures and control of extraneous variables

  +enables unifying laws to be established- allows norms to be created eg iq and provides a baseline for comparisons

  -may undervalue the impact of individual experience- doesn’t include backgrounds of people and tells us little about beneficial treatments for when diagnosed