idographic vs nomothetic Flashcards
idiographic
-focus on indivual and emphaise the unique personal experinece of human nature
-comes form ‘idios’ greek for ‘own/private’
-research comes from in-depth interviews + case studies+ thematic analysis to focus on particular indivuals or small groups + seeks insight on unqiue personal experince
-datas largely qualitive
examples of idographic
-sigmund freud + his case study of Little Hans
-also his psychodynamic approach.
-Humanistic psychologists they are focused on studying the whole person + seeing the perspective of world from the individual.
Nomothetic
-comes from greek word ‘laws’
-concerened w establishing general principles n laws based on study of large groups of people
-provides a benchmark against which ppl can be compared, classified + measured to form basis for which likely future behaviour can be predicted +/or controlled.
-data is quanitive which is subjected to statistical analysis fro. which quantified probabilities can be derived
nomothetic examples
-general laws of behaviour have been created such as behaviorusit ones of classical n operant conditioning
-eysencks persoanility research via use of psychometrics is another eg as this involved collection of large amounts of data which used factor analysis to produce diff personality types
both
-cognitive: attempts to establish general laws of congitive processing but utilises IA w case studies-atkinson + shiffrin;multistore model of memory
-psychodynamic: attempts to establish general laws in relation to innate drives, while considering unique experience (childhood)
idiographic research
shalluce and warrington
-shalluce and warrington 1970: examined case of patient kf who experinced mutlibike accident
-kfs short term forgetting of auditory info was increased more then his visual ifo
-suggests stm consists of multiple components
ao3
instead of diff approaches they should be complimentary
-should compliment rather then contradict
-million n davis 1996 suggested research should begin w nomothetic appr n once generalisations, laws, n trends have been identified they could then shift focus onto more idiographic understanding
-holt 1967 claimed IA was in reality NT in which abstract concepts (personality traits) were applied to indivual cases rather than generalised categories
-flyvbjerg 2011 claimed empirical science was itself based on case studies, since every lab experiment is a unique case
-its a matter for critical judgement whether these efforts to elide profound epistemological+ontological diff r realistic or convincing
ao3
IA strengths
-respond to criticism by emphaising evidence based nature of their descriptions
-+ conclusions, + critical awareness embedded in such research techniques as reflexivity
-and claim the validity of their findings is more secure than that which rests entirely on stats results
- as allport noted when introducing the terms into usa psychology in 1937, its only via understanding of single indivual that psychlogists can hope to predict how such indivuals will behave in given situation
ao3
IA criticisms
-those who favour either appr wuill see the other as misguided n innapropriate
-ia is unable to produce general laws/predictions about human behaviour+limits its usefulness as source of practical knowldge about diagnosis n treatment of psychological disorders
HOWEVER, has been seen to combine the 2 n produce laws such as cognitive approach such as atkinson n shiffrin w case study patient kf n hm but developed laws for the mutlistore model
ao3
counterpoint to combining the 2
-supporters of IA should still acknowledge narrow n restricted nature of their work
-meaningful generalisations cannot be made w/out further examples, as means theres no adequate baseline w which to compare behvaiour
-in addition methods used in IA like case studies tend to be less scientific in that conclusions often rely on subjective interpretation of researcher n so open to bias
-so difficult to build effective general theories of human behaviour in complete absence of nomethetic research
