Idiographic and nomothetic approaches

What is the idiographic approach?

The approach of investigating individuals in personal, in-depth detail to achieve a unique understanding of them

What does the idiographic approach assume?

People are all different so no general laws of behaviour are possible

What data does the idiographic approach use?

Qualitative eg: case studies and unstructured interviews

What is an example of the idiographic approach?

Humanistic psychology

Rogers and Maslow were interested only in documenting the conscious experience of the individual or self, rather than producing general laws of behaviour

What is the nomothetic approach?

The approach of investigating large groups of people in order to find general laws of behaviour that apply to everyone

What does the nomothetic approach assume?

Groups of people are pretty much the same so general laws of behaviour can be made

What data does the nomothetic approach produce?

Quantitative eg: questionnaires and psychological tests

What is an example of the nomothetic approach?

Behaviourism

Skinner studied animals to develop general laws of learning

Evaluation: nomothetic scientific

It’s use of experimental methods and controlled measurement allow psychologists to replicate research to examine the reliability of findings, helping psychology establish itself as scientific

Evaluation: narrow nature of idiographic

generalisations can't be made without further examples as this means there is no adequate baseline to compare behaviour with - it’s difficult to build effective general theories of human behaviour without nomothetic research BUT idiographic also doesn’t aim for this

Evaluation: qualitative idiographic

qualitative data is more rich and in-depth - this is useful as it gives the researcher a better insight into the person on which they can make conclusions on

Evaluation: loss of understanding nomothetic

preoccupied with finding general laws, it has been accused of 'losing the whole person' within psychology, and this isn’t always useful (eg: knowing there's a 1% risk of developing schizophrenia doesn't tell what life is like for someone schizophrenic) and so in its search for generalities, the nomothetic approach may sometimes fail to relate to 'experience'