Idiographic VS Nomothetic

Question 1

What is the idiographic approach and it’s testings?

Answer 1

• The Idiographic approach in psychology attempts to describe the natureof individuals.
  -People are studied as unique entities, each with their ownsubjective experiences, motivations and values.
  -There may be no attemptmade to compare these to a larger group, standard or norm.

-The idiographic approach is generally associated with those methods in psychology that produce
qualitative data, such as case studies, unstructured interviews and other self-report measures.

Question 2

What is the Nomothetic approach and it’s testings?

Answer 2

The main aim of the nomothetic approach is to produce general laws of human behaviour. These
provide a benchmark against which people can be compared, classified and measured. Using
these laws likely futurebehaviour can be predicted and/or controlled.
-Scientific Credibility

Question 3

A03 - Idiographic Approach

Answer 3

-The idiographic approach, with its in-depth qualitative methods of investigation, provides a
complete and global account of the individual.
-This is helpful in a therapeutic setting for that
particular individual.
-However, The idiographic approach is very time consuming.
-It takes a lot of time and money to study individuals in depth.

the time-consuming nature of idiographic
methods would not lead to many meaningful/useful theories/findings. = no,othetic better

Question 4

A03 - Nomothetic Approach

Answer 4

The processes involved in nomothetic research tend to be more scientific, mirroring those employed
within the natural sciences - e.g iq testing
- Such processes have enabledpsychologists to establish norms of typical behaviour (such as the
average IQ of 100), arguably giving thediscipline of psychology greater scientific credibility.

• involving tests of, say, memory, participants are treated as a series of scores rather than individual people and
  their subjective experience of the situation is ignored. In its search forgeneralities. This is important
  because it highlights that the nomothetic approach may sometimes overlook the richness of human
  experience.

Question 5

A03 - See both rather than mutually exclusive

Answer 5

Rather than seeing idiographic and nomothetic approaches as mutually exclusive, it is possible to
considerthe same issue or topic from both perspectives, depending on the nature of the research
question. Thus, inresearch on gender development, there are attempts to establish general
patterns of behaviour sittingalongside case study examples of atypical development