Idiographic and Nomothetic

• an idiographic approach involves studying individuals and focuses on their unique behaviour
• idiographic approaches do not make generalisations to the wider population
• they believe it is irrelevant to try to develop universal laws of behaviour
• usually use qualitative methods of conducting research
• a nomothetic approach involves the study of a large number of people and then the generalisation of conclusions to the wider population
• the goal is to develop laws and theories about all human behaviour
• nomothetic approaches are a type of quantitative research method
• some studies are based on large sample, and the numerical data collected is analyses and uses measures of central tendency, dispersion, graphs and statistical analysis