nomothetic debate

Nomothetic approach

A nomothetic approach comes from he Greek ‘no mos’ meaning law. Psychologists who follow this apppraoch want to find generalised laws that apply to everyone. It is often seen as objective

Scientific quantitative methods

• experiments

• Correlations Etc

Are favoured from a nomothetic point of view. Provide a benchmark against which people can be statically compared, classified and measured

What are nomothetic theories based on

The idea that we should establish universal laws of bvr which are applied to everyone and can be used to compare people with eachtoerh

Laws can be categorised;

• classifying people into groups - eg; classifying people with different types of mental disorders - anxiety, psychotic etc

• Establishing principles - such as the behaviourist laws of learning: classical and operant conditioning

• Establishing dimensions - eg; eysencks personality inventory scores people on a scale from introversion to extroversion

Strengths

• fits the aims of science - encourages precise measurement of variable; use of objective, standardised and controlled methods which allows for prediction, replication, statistical testing and generalisation

• Helped psychology become scientific and more credible developing universal laws empirically tested

Weaknesses

• treats people as ‘scores’ - losing their subjective experiences accused of losing sight of the ‘whole person’ it is preoccupied with general laws and making predictions, which only givens a superficial understanding

• eg: you do not know what it is to live with SZ from nomothetic research