Idiographic and nomothetic approaches

The idiographic approach

• Attempts to describe the nature of the individual
• Ppeople are studied as unique entitites, each with their own subjective experiences, motivations and values
• The idiographic approach is generally associated with those methods in psych that produce qualitative data, e.g, case studies, unstructured interviews and other self-report measures
• This reflects one of the central aims of idiographic research: to describe the richness of human experience and gain insight into the person's unique way of viewing the world

Examples of the idiographic approach in psych

• Humanitic psych
• Maslow and Rogers took a phenomenological approach to the study of humans and were interested only in documenting the conscious experience of the individual
• More concerned with investigating unique experience than producing general laws of behaviour 
• The psychodynamic approach is often labelled 'idiographic' because of Freud's use of case study method when detailing the lives of his patients. However, Freud had also assumed he had udentified universal laws of beh and personality dev (nomothetic)

The nomothetic approach

• The main aim of the nomothetic approach is to produce genreal laws of human behaviour
• The provide a 'benchmark' against which people can be compared, classified and measured, and on the basis of which, likely future beh can be predicted/controlled
• Most closely aligned with those methods that would be regarded as 'scientific' within psych such as experiments
• These involve the study of large numbers of people in order to establush ways in which people are similar 

Examples of the nomothetic approach in psych

• Tends to be a feature of those approaches that are reductionist, determinist and employ scientific methods of investigation
• Hypotheses are formulated, tested under controlled conditions and findings generated from large numbers of people…