Idiographic And Nomothetic Flashcards
What does idiographic mean
Approach to research that focuses more on the individual case as a means of understanding behaviour rather than aiming to formulate general laws of behaviour
What does nomothetic mean
An approach that attempts to study human behaviour through the development of general principles and universal laws
Examples of idiographic
Humanistic psychology as more concerned with investigating unique experience than producing general laws of behaviour, psychodynamic approach (Freud’s use of case studies)
Examples of nomothetic
Approaches that are reductionist and determinist and employ scientific methods of investigation eg research conducted by behaviourist/cognitive/biological psychologists
Eg Skinner and behaviours it’s studied the responses of rats in order to develop the laws of learning
-biological psychologists conducted brain scans to make generalisations about localisation of function
Methods of investigation for idiographic
Emphasises personal uniqueness, uses case studies and interviews, collects qualitative data, subjective, uses triangulation
Methods of investigation for nomothetic approach
Focuses on classifying people into groups and establishing principles, objective, controlled and scientific, use surveys
Outline strength of idiographic approach that it provides in depth data
-provides a complete account of the individual
-eg single case may generate hypotheses for further study and may reveal important insights about normal functioning which may contribute to our overall understanding such as case of HM providing insight into how different types of LTM are more resistant to forgetting and may be stored in dif areas of the brain
Expand on limitation of idiographic approach that you cannot make meaningful generalisations
-eg Oedipus complex developed from detailed study of single case of Little Hans, meaningful generalisations cannot be made without further examples as there is no adequate baseline with which to compare behaviour
-case studies also tend to rely on the subjective interpretation of the researcher
Expand on strength of nomothetic approach that it is more scientific
-mirroring those employed within the natural sciences, testing under standardised conditions analysed using statistical analysis
-enabled psychologists to establish general laws of typical behaviour which gives the discipline of psychology greater scientific credibility
Expand on limitation of nomothetic approach that it neglects individual experiences
-the preoccupation within the approach on general laws has been accused of losing the whole person within psychology, knowing there is a 1% lifetime risk of developing SZ tells us little about what life is like for someone experiencing the disorder
-in lab studies ppts are treated as a series of scores rather than individual people and their subjective experience of the situation is ignored
-may sometimes overlook the richness of human experience
Final paragraph: considering both idiographic and nomothetic and example
Rather than seeing the approaches as mutually exclusive, possible to consider the same issue from both perspectives
-in research on gender development there are attempts to establish general patterns of behaviour eg androgyny scale sitting alongside case study examples of atypical development
-goal of modern psychology is to provide rich, detailed descriptions of human behaviour as well as the explanation of such behaviour within the framework of general laws
