Issues and debates: Idiographic vs nomothetic approach Flashcards
What’s the idiographic approach?
Concerned with understanding behaviour through studying individual cases.
What’s the nomothetic approach?
Concerned with developing general laws of behaviour that apply to all people.
What are the 3 key features of the idiographic approach?
-Recognises the uniqueness of the person.
-Concerned with private and subjective experiences of the person.
-Qualitative methods
Examples of idiographic approaches in psychology.
Humanistic- focus on the self
Psychodynamic- freud case studies
What are the 3 key features of the nomothetic approach?
-Attempts to establish laws and generalisations about people.
-Concerned with objective knowledge through the use of scientific methods.
-Uses Quantitative methods
Examples of the nomothetic approaches in psychology?
Behaviourist- skinner, animals general laws.
Biological- brain scans to identify the localisation of function.
Who proposed the 3 general laws in the nomothetic approach?
Radford and Kirby
What are the 3 general laws in the nomothetic approach?
Classification —> classifying people into groups
Establishing principles —> establishing the principles of behaviour that can be applied to people in general.
Establishing dimensions —> establishing dimensions along which people can be placed, compared, measured
What did Milon and Davis suggest?
Research should start with a nomothetic approach –> produce laws –> focus on idiographic for understanding these laws.
AO3 for idiographic vs nomothetic approach
+ Useful for treatments
+ Scientific basis
- Time-consuming
- Generalising issues
(+AO3) Useful for treatments
(idiographic)
Drug treatments are not successful for all patients, some psychologists argue that alternate treatments (e.g. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) which are based on an idiographic approach are more suitable for treating individuals with such conditions, as they seek to understand and explain the disorder from a patient’s point of view.
(+AO3) Scientific basis
(nomothetic)
This is a strength of the nomothetic approach, as its highly scientific nature means that results attained are objective and reliable as the conditions used to attain them are standardised and have a high degree of control. As a result of this, the findings have scientific credibility and can be used to prove theories proposed by psychologists.
(-AO3) Idiographic approach is time consuming
It takes a lot of time and money to study individuals in depth. If a researcher is using the nomothetic approach once a questionnaire, psychometric test or experiment has been designed data can be collected relatively quickly.
(-AO3) generalising issues
Theories developed from case studies may struggle to be generalised beyond the individual, reducing the ecological validity of these findings, As a result, generalisations cannot be made without further examples, meaning that the idiographic approach alone cannot be used to improve the scientific credibility of psychology.
