Idiographic & nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation Flashcards
What does idiogrpahic approach focus on?
Focuses on the individual case as a way to understand behaviour.
What does the nomothetic approach do?
Aims to form general laws of behaviour.
What does the idiographic approach involve?
Involves the study of individuals and the unique insights each individual gives us about human behaviour.
What is the idiographic approach in terms of qualitive methods?
A qualitive method as focuses on gaining insight into human behaviour by studying individuals in depth rather than numerical data from individuals and determining average characteristics. The focus is here on the quality of information rather than quantity and employs qualitive methods like unstructured interviews/case study.
What is an example of the idiographic approach with Freud?
Freud used case studies of his patients which helped understand human behaviour like the case of Little Hans and this case consisted of 150 pages of verbatim quotes recorded by Hans father and descriptions of his life as well as Freud’s interpretations of the events. From this Freud produced generalisations from his case studies but these are still idiographic as they are drawn from unique individuals.
What do humanistic psychologists favour? Why?
Favour the idiographic approach as they are concerned with studying whole person and seeing the world from the perspective of that person and seeing the world from the perspective of that person as what matters is the subjective experience and something that someone may observe.
How did the study of Jenny help support Allport in their research?
Helped him support his theory of personality and Allport believed this idiographic perspective could tell us more about human behaviour and personality.
Why was the idiographic approach better than personality tests in Allport’s study on Jenny?
Personality tests only provide statistical information.
What was Allport’s approach called?
‘Psychology of the individual’
What does the nomothetic approach involve?
Involves a large number of people and then seeks to make generalisations or develop laws/theories about their behaviour.
What type of research is used in the nomothetic approach?
Based on numbers and the calculations come from the groups of people participating in the studies. The research studies may involve 20 people but normative research tends to involve thousands so more sets of data.
How is the biological approach an example of the nomothetic approach?
Biological approach seeks to portray basic principles of how the body & brain works and this approach has studied men and mistakenly applied the same theories to women.
How may behaviourist psychologists use the nomothetic approach/how does it apply?
Behaviourists produced general laws of behaviour (classical and operant conditioning) and this research may not have included thousands of participants but they were seeking one set of rules that apply to all people.
How does the cognitive approach an example of nomothetic?
Cognitive psychologists aim to develop general laws of behaviour that apply to all people and while it uses case studies they are required & neccessary in order to look at rare and abnormal cases.
What can we compare to Allport?
We can compare Eysenck’s (1974) psychometric approach to personality. Psychometric means measuring psychological characteristics and here large groups would be tested and the distribution of scores would tell us what is normal or abnormal.
In personality Eyseneck’s personality questionnare was used to collect large amounts of data which used to factor analysis to produce personality types.
