Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Idiographic and
Nomothetic approach
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.