idiographic vs nomothetic

Question 1

idiographic approach

Answer 1

focuses on the individual as a means of understanding behaviour, rather than aiming to formulate general laws of behaviour - it attempts to describe the behaviour of the individual. Associated with qualitative methods.
Case studies, interviews and open questionnaires take idiographic approaches.

Question 2

nomothetic approach

Answer 2

The nomothetic approach aims to produce general laws of human behaviour, giving a ‘benchmark’ to which people can be compared, classified and measured.
This means that future behaviour can be predicted, controlled and understood.
Associated with quantitative methods.
Experiments, correlations, closed questionnaires take nomothetic approaches.

Question 3

strengths of idiographic

Answer 3

gain depth and detail about an individual, starting point for future research, more feasible because less participants and less money to run a study.

Question 4

limitations of idiographic

Answer 4

unscientific so not able to establish laws of behaviour, can take a long time to research individuals, difficult to make generalisations.

Question 5

strengths of nomothetic

Answer 5

more scientific, subjective and uses standardised methods, reliable and shouldn’t be any bias, more feasible for a larger number of participants.

Question 6

limitations of nomothetic

Answer 6

need money and time to carry out the research, less meaningful results because it is quantitative data, can’t find out rich in-depth information about individual cases.