Idiographic

• Idiographic

  Focuses on the individuals and emphasises uniqueness (case studies), favours qualitative methods and formulating general laws of behaviour 
• Examples of idiographic approach

  Freud - case of Little Hans

  • pages of recorded notes and descriptions of his life events
  • generlisations of the case study
• The use of case studies

  The idiographic approach uses case studies to inform theoretical models, evaluate previous theories and construct hypotheses
• Case study examples

  Cognitive psychology - Clive Wearing

  Biological psychology - Tan

  Psychodynamics - Little Hans
• Humanistic psychology

  Due to the subjective and highly complex psychological aspects of human behaviour, humanistic psychologists focus on the uniqueness of human experience.

  This has led to client-centred therapy – a technique that takes a highly individualised approach to treatment (compared to nomothetic treatments like drug therapy)
• +   It provides evidence -based principles. Throughout qualitative methods, much more in-depth research is possible, a deeper understanding of the topics being looked into is also available.
• -       Idiographic approach is rarely able to find generlisations/predictions about behaviour. It would be too time consuming to find individual treatments using drug therapy for example.

  +   However, Allport does state once an idiographic approach has enough detailed observations of individuals, then they can make predictions 
• -       The idiographic approach is more time consuming. Collecting large amounts of data from individuals is slow, this can make researching a topic more expensive and difficult to carry out than other methods
• Idiographic approach

  1. Definition and Examples
  2. Case studies
  3. Humanistic psychology
  4. Client-Centred therapy