idiographic + nomothetic approaches

• the idiographic approach involves the study of individuals and the unique insights each individual gives us about human human behaviour
• qualitative methods: the 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 + determining average characteristics
• qualitative methods: the focus is on the quality of information instead of the quantity
• qualitative methods: it is also qualitative because it employs qualitative methods such as unstructured interviews, case studies + thematic analysis
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: Sigmund Freud used case studies of his patients as a way to understand human behaviour such as the case of Little Hans
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: Little Hans' case consists of almost 150 pages of verbatim quotes recorded by Hans' father and descriptions of events in Hans' life plus Freud's own interpretations of the events
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: Freud did produce generalisations from his case studies but these are still idiographic because they are drawn from unique individuals
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: humanistic psychologists also favour the idiographic approach as they are concerned w/ studying the whole person and seeing the world from the perspective of that person
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: what matters is the person's subjective experience and not something that someone else might observe of their behaviour
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: the study of Jenny by Gordon Allport was used by him as a way to support his theory of personality
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: Allport believed that this idiographic perspective could tell us more about human behaviour + personality than could the use of personality tests which only provide statistical information
• e.g. of the idiographic approach: in fact Allport 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: quantitative research is based on numbers = measures of central tendency and dispersion, graphs and statistical analysis
• quantitative research: such calculations require data from groups of people rather than individuals
• quantitative research: research studies may only involves 20 people but normative research such as establishing norms for IQ test involves thousands of participants
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: the biological approach seeks to portray the basic principles of how the body and brain work
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: this approach has sometimes mistakenly just studied men and assumed that the same processes would occur in women e.g. the stress response
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: behaviourist psychologists produced general laws of behvaiour = classical + 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 + non-humans
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: cognitive approach 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
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: the cognitive approach does use case studies (such as HM, the man w/ 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
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: with Allport's research on personality we can consider Hans Eysenck's psychometric approach to personality, psychometrics literally means measuring psychological characteristics such as personality and intelligence
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: large groups of people are tested and the distribution of their scores informs us about what is normal and abnormal
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: 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
• e.g. of nomothetic approach: factor analysis is a statistical technique that reduces data to a smaller set of component variables
• idiographic S: detail from an idiographic approach is rich + often prompts ideas for further research
• idiographic L: research findings that are carried out on a single person lack population validity because of their uniqueness and cannot be generalised at all
• nomothetic S: the detail gathered from a nomothetic approach is vast and enables researchers to generalise findings to the population
• nomothetic L: because one size does not fit all some explanations are not appropriate because of individual differences
• biological approach is nomothetic = it creates universal laws as humans share similar physiologies
• behaviourist is nomothetic is creates universal laws as behaviour is the result of stimulus-response associations
• SLT is nomothetic is attempts to establish general laws of behaviour (e.g. vicarious reinforcement)
• cognitive is nomothetic and idiographic it attempts to establish general laws of cognitive processing but utilises an idiographic approach w/ case studies
• psychodynamic is nomothetic and idiographic it attempts to establish general laws in relation to innate drives, while considering unique experience (during childhood)
• humanist is idiographic is focuses on the subjective human experience and makes no attempt to create general laws
• idiographic: data generalised is detailed and extensive
• idiographic: the sample will not be representative because of the uniqueness of the traits that individual possesses
• idiographic: it uses methods such as the case study to investigate the individual
• idiographic: this approach is useful in generating new areas of research
• nomothetic: this would generate a large amount of data