2.5: Idiographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation

Question 1

Briefly outline one problem of the idiographic approach to research and one problem with the nomothetic approach to research (4 marks)

Answer 1

One problem with the idiographic approach is that findings from its main research method, the case study, cannot be generalised to target populations.
The idiographic approach studies what makes people unique, but fails to identify what people have in
common

Question 2

Briefly outline one problem of the idiographic approach to research and one problem with the nomothetic approach to research (4 marks).
One problem with the idiographic approach is that findings from its main research method, the case study, cannot be generalised to target populations.
The idiographic approach studies what makes people unique, but fails to identify what people have in
common.

One problem with the nomothetic approach

Answer 2

One problem with the nomothetic approach is that in seeking to find explanations that apply to all individuals, for example explanations of how relationships form, the
approach cannot account for individual cases that refute such explanations