Idiographic and Nomothetic approach

Idiographic and Nomothetic approach

1. Idiographic Approach - focuses on individuals and emphasises uniqueness; qualitative in nature as focuses on in depth insight into human behavior, quality and quantity.

   • unstructured interviews, case studies, thematic analysis.
   • Freud (1909) Little Hans - case study, researched 150 pages of quotes from hans' father and freud's own interpretations.
   • Humanistic psychologists use the ideographic approach as they are concerned with the whole person.
   • Strengths
     • Allport (1961) - the first person to use the term "idiographic", said that psychology needed a drastic re-orientation as psychologists had lost sight of what it was to be human. he argued that only by fully understanding the individual could we predict how they might act in a given situation.
       • responsible for refocusing psychology back on the individual.
   • Criticisms
     • it's not scientific.
       • however some methods such as case studies and qualitative research are evidence based and seek to be objective; attempts are made to ensure validity.
         • some qualitative tests use reflexivity to assess factors which might affect the researcher and participants.
     • Inability to produce general predictions about behaviour - this is important in the creation of drug therapies etc... which is a major limitation. furthermore would be far too time consuming to produce personal therapies for every individual (suggests idiographic approach is not suitable for developing psychological treatments).
     • Time Consuming - both approaches based on large amounts of data but idiographic approach is about just 1 person. recording large amounts of data about a group is relatively quicker bc the data can be generated more easily. Idiographic approach is less efficient at data collection.

2. Nomothetic Approach - tries to formulate general laws of behaviour and is based on the study of groups. studies large samples in order to make generalisations; they use quantitative methods in the same way as the scientific results.

   • Biological approach takes a nomothetic stance as they try to formulate general laws about how the body and brain work.
   • Behavioural psychologists produce general laws of behaviour e.g. classical and operant conditioning.

3. Interactionism

   • Holt (1967) claims there is no thing as a unique individual, the idiographic approach is used for general principles
   • distinction between approaches is false
   • Millon and David (1996) - researchers should start a study using the nomothetic approach and then focus on idiographic for greater understanding.