Idiographic and Nomothetic

• Idiographic Approach

  Focuses more on the individual as a means of understanding behaviour
• Nomothetic Approach

  Attempts to study human behaviour through the development of general principles and universal laws
• Idiographic Approach to psychological investigations

  • The number of PPs in idiographic research is small or even just individuals
  • It may include the person's family at most
  • Generalisations cannot be made as it is about understanding the individual
• Idiographic research methods

  • Qualitative research
  • Case studies or unstructured interviews
  • Aims to get insight and depth from PPs
• Examples of idiographic approach in psychology

  • Humanistic and Psychodynamic
  • Rogers dealt with conditions of self worth which did client centred therapy and helping the person come up with their own solutions
  • Freud did many case studies such as Wolfman which were subjective accounts of a person's experience to understand behaviour
• Nomothetic research methods

  • Quantitative research
  • Structured interviews to get a large amount of data of many people
  • Statistical analysis to test for significance
  • Aims to quantify human behaviour to create general laws
• Examples of nomothetic approach in psychology

  • Behaviourist and biological approach
  • BF Skinner used rats in a controlled lab experiments and got quantitative data to develop general laws for learning
  • Biological approach used brain scans which are objective to generalise to the wider population
• Objective vs Subjective

  • Objectivity happens in the nomothetic approach
  • Laws of behaviour are only possible if methods of assessment are delivered in a standardised and objective way
  • True replication across samples
  • Subjectivity happens in the idiographic approach as it is about an individual's experience
• AO3 Idiographic: Lack of generalisability

  • Suffers from the inability to produce general predictions about behaviour
  • Makes treatments difficult to devise
  • It would be for too time consuming to produce personal therapies for each individual
  • This may be due to not being as scientific as the nomothetic approach making it difficult to establish cause and effect and generalise to others
• AO3 Idiographic: Avoids cultural bias

  • The nomothetic approach suffers from universality as it assumes behaviour will be the same everywhere
  • This leads to ethnocentrism which is the superiority of one culture over another
  • By focusing on individuals the idiographic approach avoids doing this and making general laws that may not even apply to everyone
• AO3 Nomothetic: Scientific credibility

  • The majority of psychology is based on the nomothetic approach as patterns and trends can be seen
  • This is due to the standardised and objective methods used
  • In line with the features of science due to objectivity and replication
  • Predictions can be made as well as interventions devised where necessary
• AO3 Nomothetic: Losing the person

  • The nomothetic approach is occupied with creating general laws so it loses the whole person
  • There is a 1% risk of developing schizophrenia but this does not tell us about how it is having to live with such a disorder
  • Understanding the subjective experience might be useful when producing treatments in this case