ido and nom

• The idiographic approach involves the study of individuals and the unique insights each individualgives us about human behaviour.Qualitative methodsThe idiographic approach is qualitative because the focus is on gaining insights into human behaviour by studying unique individuals in depth rather than gaining numerical data from many individuals and determining average characteristics.
• idographic. The focus is on the quality of information rather than quantity.It is also qualitative because it employs qualitative methods such as unstructured interviews, case studies and thematic analysis.Examples of the idiographic approachSigmund Freud used case studies of his patients as a way to understand human behaviour, such as the case of Little Hans. Freud did produce generalisations from his case studies, but these are still idiographic because they are drawn from unique individuals
• Humanistic psychologists also favour the idiographic approach as they are concerned with studying the whole person and seeing the world from the perspective of that person. What matters is the person's subjective experience and not something that someone else might observe of their behaviour. Allport believed that this idiographic perspective could tell us more about human behaviour and personality than could the use of personality tests, which only provide statistical information. In fact he called his approach the 'psychology of the individual
• The nomothetic approach involves the study of a large number of people and then seeks to make generalisations or develop laws/theories about their behaviour. This is also the goal of the scientific approach. Quantitative research is based on numbers - measures of central tendency and dispersion, graphs and statistical analysis. Such calculations require data from groups of people rather than individuals. Research studies may only involve 20 people, but normative research, such as establishing norms for 1Q tests, involves thousands of participants.
• Examples of the nomothetic approachThe biological approach seeks to portray the basic principles of how the body and brain work. As we saw earlier in this chapter, this approach has sometimes mistakenly just studied men and assumed that the same processes would occur in women, e.g. the stress response.Behaviourist psychologists produced general laws of behaviour - classical and operant conditioning.Their research may not have involved thousands of human participants, which is the more typical nomothetic approach, but they were seeking one set of rules for all animals - humans and non-humans.
• Cognitive psychology is also a nomothetic approach in its aim to develop general laws of behaviour which apply to all people, such as understanding typical memory processes. The cognitive approach does use case studies (such as HM, the man with no short-term memory), but these are required because, in order to understand the working of the normal mind, it is often necessary to look at rare abnormal cases.
• Finally, Eysenck's psychometric approach to personality. Psychometrics literally means measuring psychological characteristics such as personality and intelligence. Large groups of people are tested, and the distribution of their scores informs us about what is normal and abnormal. In the case of personality, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) was used to collect large amounts of data which used factor analysis to produce the personality types shown on the left. (Factor analysis is a statistical technique that reduces data to a smaller set of component variables.)
• A strength of the idiographic approach is its focus on the individual. Humanistic and qualitative psychologists felt that there was too much emphasis on measurement and psychologists had lost sight of what it was to be human. Allport argued that a drastic reorientation was needed and that's what the idiographic approach did. Allport argued that it is only by knowing the person as an individual that we can predict what that person will do in any situation.This suggests that the focus on individuals can provide us with a more complete understanding.
• A limitation of the idiographic approach is a lack of objective evidence. Positive psychology aims to be more evidence-based. However, other idiographic approaches do use an evidence-based approach and also seek to be objective. For example, qualitative approaches use reflexivity to identify the influence of any biases. Reflexivity refers to the process where the researcher reflects or thinks critically during the research process about the factors that affect the behaviour of both researchers and participants.Thus idiographic approaches do embrace many of the aims of the scientific approach.
• The idiographic approach may be scientific, but the inability to make predictions about behaviour is limiting. Such as predictions to producing drugs to treat mental illness. It would be far too time consuming to produce personal therapies for individuals. However, Allport argued that the idiographic approach does enable predictions. Once a researcher has built up extremely detailed observations of individuals, this can be used to make generalisations. Overall, this suggests that nomothetic approaches are more useful than the idiographic approach in developing psychological treatments.
• A limitation of the idiographic approach is that it is more time consuming. Both approaches are based on large amounts of data, but one collects large amounts of data about one person and the other is in terms of number of people. Collecting large amounts of data from a group of people takes time but, relatively speaking, is quicker because, once you have devised a questionnaire or psychological test, data can be generated and processed quickly.This means that the idiographic approach is less efficient when it comes to data collection.