Idiographic and nomothetic Flashcards
What is the idiographic approach?
Attempts to describe the nature of an individual. People are unique entities with their own subjective experiences, motivations and values.
What psychological methods is the idiographic approach associated with?
Self report, qualitative data, case studies, unstructured interviews.
What is the nomothetic approach?
To produce general laws of human behaviour and provide a benchmark against which people can be classified, measured and compared.
What psychological methods would the nomothetic approach be associated with?
Experiments with large samples.
Give an example of the nomothetic approach.
Behaviourist, cognitive and biological psychology. For example, Skinner studied hundreds of rats, cats and pigeons in order to develop the laws of learning. Biological psychologists have conducted brain scans on countless human brains to make generalisations about localisation of function. Cognitive psychologists have been able to infer the structure and processes of human behaviour by measuring performance of large samples of people in lab tests.
Give an example of the idiographic approach.
Humanistic psychology is the best example. Rogers and Maslow studied human beings and were interested in documenting the conscious experience of the self.
Key aspects of idiographic and nomothetic approaches.
-Define idographic
-Define nomothetic
-Examples of idiographic
-Examples of nomothetic
Give a strength of the idiographic approach.
Provides us with a complete and global account of an individual. For example, the single case of HM generated hypotheses for further study and revealed important insights about normal brain functioning.
Limitation of idiographic approach.
It is narrow and restricted. One criticism of freuds work is that his key concepts are often based from one detailed study of a single case e.g little hans. Meaningful generalisations cannot be made without further examples.
Strength of nomothetic approach.
Its research processes tend to be more scientific. E.g testing under standardised conditions, statistical analysis etc. Such processes have enabled psychologists to establish norms of typical behaviour arguably giving greater scientific credibility.
Give a limitation of the nomothetic approach.
Has been accused of ‘losing the whole person’ in psychplogy. E.g knowing there is a 1% risk of developing schizophrenia does not tell us anything about what it is like to live with it. Similarly, in research studies, participants are treated as a series of scores rather than people.
