Ideographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation Flashcards
What is the ideographic approach?
Understanding behaviour through studying individual cases.
Describe the type of data that the ideographic approach produces.
Qualitative - insights into human behaviour by studying unique individuals in depth rather than numerical data from numerous people. Qualitative techniques: unstructured interviews, case studies and thematic analysis.
What are the principles of the ideographic approach?
Reject scientific approach.
Individuals not groups.
Do not generalise (we are unique).
Subjective experience.
Observer is never correct.
Give an example of an approach that adopts the ideographic approach.
Freud and the psychodynamic approach. Little Hans - lengthy communication with his father helped with development of psychosexual stages.
What is the nomothetic approach.
Understanding behaviour through developing general laws that apply to all people.
Describe the type of data that the nomothetic approach produces.
Quantitative - based on numbers from large groups. Includes measures of CT and dispersion, graphs and stats tests.
What is an important principal of the nomothetic approach?
Finding similarities between people and establishing laws that govern behaviour and apply to all people.
Give an example of a study that adopted the nomothetic approach.
Bandura’s Bobo Doll study. Large sample of children, established laws surrounding social learning e.g. importance of same-sex model. Has been applied to other children to explain how they learn (teaching, advertising, entertainment).
(AO3) Describe an alternate/compromise approach in relation to ideographic vs nomothetic.
Complementary approach (Holt). Ideo/nom shouldn’t be seen as conflicting. Best when both used: ideographic giving insight into general principles developed by nomothetic. Has been suggested research should start by developing general principles and laws, then use ideographic to develop specific understanding. Shows importance of both approaches.
(AO3) Describe the advantage of the ideographic approach in psychology.
Humanists and qualitative psychologists realised there was too much emphasis on reducing humans to data sets. Drastic reorientation was needed, ideographic and nomothetic terms introduced. Shifted momentum to focus more on the self - as it is the ‘only way to predict behaviour’. Positive impact on psychology overall.
(AO3) What is the main weakness of the ideographic approach?
Lack of scientific evidence which is important in psychology - e.g. development of treatments. Positive psychology argues humanistic theories are meaningless due to lack of evidence.
But ‘positive psychology’ is branch of ideographic, giving more evidence for its theories than humanistic approach. Shows importance of evidence despite being ideographic.
(AO3) Why may both ideographic and nomothetic be considered time consuming?
Ideo - time to collect large amounts of data on an individual - often longitudinal study.
Nomo - time to collect a large amount of data from a number of people. Since nomo is focused on repetition, could be argued ideo is more time consuming.
