ideographic and nomothetic

Question 1

ideographic

Answer 1

focuses on the individuals behaviour, such as case studies, unstructured interviews and self-report

Question 2

nomothetic

Answer 2

attempts to study human behaviour through the development of general laws and principles
such as experiments and structured interviews

Question 3

nomothetic approaches

Answer 3

biological, behaviourist, cognitive and social learning

Question 4

ideographic

Answer 4

humanistic and psychodynamic

Question 5

ideographic AO3 - strength, case study

Answer 5

Phineas Gage
in depth and qualitative, provides a complete global account of the individual

Question 6

ideographic AO3 - limitation, case study

Answer 6

narrow and restrictive nature of the world, limits overall usefulness of the research, generalisations cannot be made without further examples, no adequate baseline with which to compare behaviour
- case studies also suffer from researcher bias

Question 7

nomothetic AO3 - for

Answer 7

• more scientific, testing under standardised conditions and certain statistical outcomes
• helped scientists establish norms giving the discipline of psychology greater scientific credibility
• useful for predicting behaviour, e.g. post-natal depression, and can help identify woman who may need counselling or medication

Question 8

nomothetic AO3 - against

Answer 8

• accused of ‘loosing the whole person’
• knowing theres a 1% risk of developing schitzophrenia tells us little about what it is like for an individual living with that disorder
• pts are treated as scores and their subjective experiences are ignored
• laws overlook the richness of human experiences

Question 9

ideographic issues

Answer 9

unable to produce general predictions about behaviour
- however some argue that when you have detailed observations of few individuals then this can be used to formulate theories

• time consuming