Idiographic vs Nomothetic

IDIOGRAPHIC 

• Focuses on understanding individual behaviour 
• Qualitative (non-numerical) methods are used e.g. unstructured interviews, case studies and thematic analysis 

Example - Humanistic psychology studies the person as a whole and are interested in the person's subjective experiences. 

NOMOTHETIC 

• General laws and theories for human behaviour
• Quantitative (numerical) methods are used e.g. central tendancy and dispersion, graphs

Example - Cognitive psychology simplifies memory processes to simple basic units to apply general laws to everyone. 

AO3 

Idiographic 

Strength - Using qualitative methods provides a global account of the individual. Findings from idiographic research can provide important insights about normal functioning which can benefit our overall understanding further. 

Weakness - However, an idiographic approach is not scientific because methods associated with idiographic research such as case studies rely on…