Issues and Debates - Idiographic v Nomothetic Approaches Flashcards
What is the difference between an idiographic and nomothetic approach?
Idiographic approach = focuses on the individual case as a means of understanding behaviour rather than aiming to formulate general laws of behaviour.
Nomothetic approach = attempts to study human behaviour through the development of general laws and principles.
The features of a nomothetic approach
- An approach that attempts to study human behaviour through the development of general principles and universal laws
- General laws of human behaviour provide a benchmark against which people can be compared, classified and measured
- On the basis of benchmarks, likely future behaviour can be predicted and / or controlled
- Generally associated with research methods that would be regarded as scientific such as experiments
- Hypotheses are formulated, tested under controlled conditions and findings generated from large numbers of people are analysed for statistical significance to propose and develop general laws and principles
- The research methods involve the study of large numbers to inform the use of the ways in which people are different from one another
Features of the idiographic approach
- An approach to research the focuses more on the individual case as a means of understanding behaviour rather than aiming to formulate general laws of behaviour
- People are studied as unique entities, each with their own subjective experiences, motivations and values
- There may be no attempt to compare the study of unique entities to a larger group, standard or norm
- Generally associated with research methods that gather qualitative data e.g. case studies, unstructured interviews and other self-report measures
- The research methods reflect the central aims of the research; to describe the richness of human experience and gain insight into the person’s unique way of viewing the world
The case of HM - idiographic approach
- Following a surgery to help cure his epileptic seizures, he lost part of his hippocampus, his amygdala and his uncus
- He lost the ability to form new memories as a result and remembered no major life events after his surgery - however, his procedural memory remained intact and he was able to perform tasks with ease, even commenting at how easy it is despite having no memory of doing it before (drawing a star in a mirror) - his STM also remained intact and his intelligence remained, giving an extensive understanding of the amount of memory he had
- It also helped further investigations of the types of memory and the idea it is stored in different brain areas
Examples of the idiographic approach
- HM (memory)
- Czech twins (attachment)
- The humanistic approach (approaches)
- Freud’s case studies e.g. Little Hans (approaches)
- Phineas Gage (brain function)
Case study:
- Miller’s discovery that the capacity of the STM is 7 +/- 2. This is sometimes referred to as Miller’s Law – that STM has a standard and limited span.
- Remember HM, who following treatment for epilepsy developed anterograde amnesia. He could not make new long-term memories. However, experimental work with HM showed that he could make new long-term procedural memories (muscle memories) for simple motor skills (drawing a star in a mirror). This proved invaluable in revealing how different types of LTM are more resistant to forgetting and may be stored in different parts of the brain.
Examples of the nomothetic approach
- Laws of learning (behaviourist approach/learning theory of attachment/learning explanation of phobias)
- Models of memory (MSM and WMM)
- Biological explanations of OCD/schizophrenia (psychopathology)
Discussing nomothetic v idiographic approaches - arguments for the idiographic approach
1) With it’s in depth qualitative methods of investigation, this approach provides a complete and global account of the individual and this may complement the nomothetic approach by shedding further light on general laws or by challenging such laws
- For example, the single case such as HM may generate further hypotheses for further study and it can also be seen in the case of brain damaged individuals, findings may reveal important insights about normal functioning which may contribute to our overall understanding
Discussing nomothetic v idiographic approaches - against the idiographic approach
1) This approach involves ork that is narrow and restricted in nature - one criticism of Freud is that many of the key concepts (e.g. the Oedipus complex) were largely developed from the detailed study of a single case (Lttle Hans)
- Meaningful generalisations cannot be made without further examples, as there is no adequate baseline with which to compare behaviour, and such general laws can be useful or example in producing drugs to treat mental illness and it would be far too time consuming to produce personal therapies for unique individuals and therefore we need to make predictions about the most helpful solutions
- This approach does however enable predictions as once a researcher has built up extremely detailed observations of a few individuals and this can be used to make generalisations and formulate theories
- Methods used within this approach, such as case studies, tend to be the least scientific in that conclusions often rely on the subjective interpretation o the researcher and so can be open to bias
Discussing the nomothetic v idiographic approaches - arguments for the nomothetic approach
1) The processes involved in this research tend to be more scientific, mirroring the ones used in the natural sciences - testing under standardised conditions, using data sets that provide group averages, statistical analysis, prediction and control, for example in the field of IQ testing
- Such processes have enabled psychologists to establish norms of typical behaviour e.g. IQ scores of 100 arguably giving psychology as a discipline greater credibility
Discussing the nomothetic v idiographic approaches - against the nomothetic approach
1) The preoccupation with general laws, prediction and control has led to an accusation of losing the whole person within psychology
- Knowing there is a 1% lifetime risk of schizophrenia tells us little about what life is like for someone who has the disorder, and similarly lab studies involving memory test see participants as sets of scores rather than individual people, and their subjective experience of the situation is ignored, and in searching for generalities, this approach may sometimes overlook the richness of human experience
How the nomothetic and idiographic approaches compliment one another
- Rather than seeing the approaches as mutually exclusive or alternatives, it is possible to consider the same issue or topic from both perspectives, depending on the nature of the research question - the goal of modern psychology is to provide rich, detailed descriptions of human behaviour, as well as the explanation of such behaviour within a framework of general laws
- For example, within attachment research, Schaffer’s stages of attachment are nomothetic as they are applied to all children generally, suggesting that all children go through the stages in the same order
- Ainsworth’s Strange Situation is also an example of nomothetic research as it was conducted on many people in a laboratory and generalised attachment types were produced
- Bowlby’s 44 thieves study is an example of idiographic research as it was based on a series of detailed case studies involving interviews with children and parents over many months, and the data was used to produce generalizations about early development
