idiographic/nomothetic

• nomos - laws
• ideo - self / privat e
• nomothetic - general laws of behaviour that apply to all of us
• ideographic - high quality data that is specific to individual and not generalised
• nomothetic laws - classifying people into groups

  establishing principles of behaviour

  establishing dimensions
• nomothetic - structured observations

  lab studies

  experimental conditions
• ideographic - case studies, content analysis, unstructured interviews
• idiographic - valid
• nomothetic - reliable
• idiographic - + hypothesis generation because of unusual cases
• idographic negative - subjectivity because researcher can loose objectivity
• strength of nomothetic - generalisations can be made and prediction of behaviour
• negative of nomothetic - superficial as it is not holistic
• complementarity use of both methods in research can create depth and predictve value