Idiographic and nomothetic approaches:
- Created by: Emilywilkinson12
- Created on: 27-04-18 18:14
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- Idiographic and nomothetic approaches:
- AO1:
- The idiographic apprach:
- The idiographic apprach aims to describe the nature of the individual. People are studied as unique entities with their own subjective experiences, motivations and values. There is no attempt to compare these to a larger group standard or norm.
- The idiographic approach is associated with methods in psychology that produce qualitative data (e.g. case studies, unstructured interviews and other self-report measures). This reflects one of the central aims of idiographic reseach - to describe the richness of human experience and gain insight into the peron's unique way of viewing the world.
- Humanistic psychology is the best example of the idiogrpahic approach. Rogers and Maslow were interested only in documenting the conscious experience of the individual or 'self', rather than producing general laws of behaviour. The psychodymanic approach is often thought of as idiogrpahic because of Freud's use of the case studt method. But Freud also assumped he had identified universal laws of behaviour and personality developemnt (the language of the nomothetic approach).
- The nomothetic approach:
- The main aim of the nomothetic apprach is to produce general laws of behaviour. These provide a benchmark against which people can be compared, classified and measured. Future behaviour can then be predicted and controlled.
- The nomothetic appraoch s most closely asociated with methods defined as reliable and scientfic withing psychology (e.g. questionnaires and psychological tests). These involve the study of larger numbers of people to establish how people are similar (which also tells…
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