Issues and debates - Idiographic and nomothetic approaches

Question 1

What are idiographic approaches?

Answer 1

• Idiographic approaches use qualitative techniques to study individuals, in depth
• The focus is on describing the uniqueness of the person’s experience, not providing general laws or theories of human behaviours that apply to all
• The research methods include: Case studies, unstructured interviews and observations

Question 2

What approaches use idiographic techniques?

Answer 2

• Humanistic and psychodynamic psychology both use idiographic techniques
• Humanists see each individual as fundamentally unique, suggesting it is meaningless to produce general laws of behaviour
• Freud did produce general laws of behaviour but created these from idiographic case studies such as little Hanz
• Other approaches use unusual case studies for theory generation (Clive wearing, Phineas Gage, Tan)

Question 3

What are nomothetic approaches?

Answer 3

• Nomothetic approaches use quantitative techniques to study populations, then using data they construct general testable theories/laws/classifications that apply to all
• Scientific experimentation that is objective and controlled is the primary research method
• Data that is produced is assessed with inferential statistics before the hypothesis is accepted

Question 4

What approaches use nomothetic approaches?

Answer 4

-Biological, behaviourist and cognitive psychologists are seen as nomothetic approaches as they assume the same principles apply across all humans and have developed and tested their theories by replicable experimental techniques

Question 5

What is a strength to the nomothetic approach?

Answer 5

• Nomothetic techniques use clear procedures, meaning they are replicable
• Using statistical methods, psychologists are able to generalise findings and predict future behaviour to create reliable treatments

Question 6

What is a weakness of the nomothetic approach?

Answer 6

• Nomothetic research does not give a full picture of the individual
• Two people with an OCD diagnosis are likely to have very different personal experiences, even if they have the same gene in common

Question 7

What is a weakness of the idiographic approach?

Answer 7

• Idiographic case studies cannot demonstrate the validity of a hypothesis, due to the small sample
• However unusual cases can generate new interesting areas of research, or overturn old incorrect theories

Question 8

What is a weakness of the idiographic approach?

Answer 8

-Idiographic researcher’s intensive data collection techniques such as longitudinal case studies can result in the researcher losing objectivity and introducing bias into the interpretation of the data collected

Question 9

How is the idiographic approach and the nomothetic approach seen as complimentary to each other?

Answer 9

• The strengths of both approaches mean that each is more appropriate in particular research circumstances
• Using idiographic research can give depth and description to established nomothetic laws of behaviour that provides high predictive value