Issues and Debates: Idiographic vs. Nomothetic

Question 1

Idiographic Approach

Answer 1

• Area of psychology that concentrates on the individual, rather than the group.
• It is more interested in the quality of experience of a single person than it is with how people, as viewed as a category, behave.

Question 2

Nomothetic approach

Answer 2

• Area of psychology that concentrates on creating general laws or principles about human behaviour.
• Here, we tend to group people together, or average across the findings of multiple people.

Question 3

Examples of idiographic

Answer 3

• Carl rogers and Abraham Maslow are interested in the phenomenological approach to psychology, concentrating on the experience of being rather than on scientific experiments comparing how they behave on an IV based on a DV.
• Psychodynamic approach idiographic?
• Yes and no, as although he was interested in the individual presentation of an issue (idiographic), he always then applied this to the universal laws of behaviour and personality that he’d created (nomothetic).

Question 4

Examples of the nomothetic

Answer 4

• Anything that uses averaging across people or that want to speak to universal principles of behaviour.

Question 5

Case for the use of idiographic?

Answer 5

• They are necessarily difficult to generalise from. The more detail you go into on a person, the less similarity there will be with anyone else.

Question 6

Case against use of idiographic

Answer 6

• They are necessarily difficult to generalise from. The more detail you go into on a person, the less similarity there will be with anyone else.

Question 7

Case for the use of nomothetic

Answer 7

• Allows standardisation of conditions. The whole point of it is that it allows comparison between people. That allows predictions about behaviour, which is the whole point of psychology isn’t it?
• People do X in Y situation.

Question 8

Case against the use of nomothetic

Answer 8

• In reducing someone to a score, you lose the person in the psychology.
• There may also be confounding variables for which we have not controlled.
• Perhaps we should start with the nomothetic to get a baseline for a person and then start thinking more ideographically. We want the detail, and we want the broad psychological construct.

Question 9

Eval statictics

Answer 9

• Nomothetic approach: only allows a superficial understanding because it uses statistics. Someone is clever, someone is strong? Bench 115?

Question 10

eval quantitative data

Answer 10

• Nomothetic approach: uses quantitative data, meaning that we can easily distinguish differences. Who’s better? People with the higher numbers.

Question 11

eval generalisation

Answer 11

• Idiographic: bad because it cannot be generalised. So, we can’t take information from one person and apply is directly to another.

Question 12

eval qualitative

Answer 12

• Idiographic is qualitative, you gain greater insight into a person vs just using numbers.

Question 13

eval both

Answer 13

• They can be combined for the best results.