Issues and Debates: Idiographic vs. Nomothetic Flashcards
1
Q
Idiographic Approach
A
- Area of psychology that concentrates on the individual, rather than the group.
- It is more interested in the quality of experience of a single person than it is with how people, as viewed as a category, behave.
2
Q
Nomothetic approach
A
- Area of psychology that concentrates on creating general laws or principles about human behaviour.
- Here, we tend to group people together, or average across the findings of multiple people.
3
Q
Examples of idiographic
A
- Carl rogers and Abraham Maslow are interested in the phenomenological approach to psychology, concentrating on the experience of being rather than on scientific experiments comparing how they behave on an IV based on a DV.
- Psychodynamic approach idiographic?
- Yes and no, as although he was interested in the individual presentation of an issue (idiographic), he always then applied this to the universal laws of behaviour and personality that he’d created (nomothetic).
4
Q
Examples of the nomothetic
A
- Anything that uses averaging across people or that want to speak to universal principles of behaviour.
5
Q
Case for the use of idiographic?
A
- They are necessarily difficult to generalise from. The more detail you go into on a person, the less similarity there will be with anyone else.
6
Q
Case against use of idiographic
A
- They are necessarily difficult to generalise from. The more detail you go into on a person, the less similarity there will be with anyone else.
7
Q
Case for the use of nomothetic
A
- Allows standardisation of conditions. The whole point of it is that it allows comparison between people. That allows predictions about behaviour, which is the whole point of psychology isn’t it?
- People do X in Y situation.
8
Q
Case against the use of nomothetic
A
- In reducing someone to a score, you lose the person in the psychology.
- There may also be confounding variables for which we have not controlled.
- Perhaps we should start with the nomothetic to get a baseline for a person and then start thinking more ideographically. We want the detail, and we want the broad psychological construct.
9
Q
Eval statictics
A
- Nomothetic approach: only allows a superficial understanding because it uses statistics. Someone is clever, someone is strong? Bench 115?
10
Q
eval quantitative data
A
- Nomothetic approach: uses quantitative data, meaning that we can easily distinguish differences. Who’s better? People with the higher numbers.
11
Q
eval generalisation
A
- Idiographic: bad because it cannot be generalised. So, we can’t take information from one person and apply is directly to another.
12
Q
eval qualitative
A
- Idiographic is qualitative, you gain greater insight into a person vs just using numbers.
13
Q
eval both
A
- They can be combined for the best results.
