Idiographic and Nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation Flashcards
Nomothetic approaches
Involve studying large groups of people to make generalisations about individuals and group behaviour, and developing heroes based on these findings.
This approach follows established scientific practice and is associated with the biological, behavioural and cognitive approaches and quantitative methods of investigation such as experiments, correlation studies and closed ended questionnaires.
Idiographic approaches
involve studying individuals and then generalising these observations to human behaviour as a whole.
This approach does not follow established scientific practice and is associated with the psychodynamic and humanistic approaches, and qualitative methods of investigation such as case studies and interviews.
What approaches are nomothetic?
Biological, Behavioural and cognitive approaches
Does nomothetic approaches use quantitative or qualitative methods of investigation?
Quantitative
What approaches are idiographic?
Psychodynamic and humanistic
Does idiographic approaches use qualitative or quantitative methods of investigation?
Qualitative
What is the aim of nomothetic approaches?
To discover general laws of human behaviour which can be used to predict cause-effect relationships concerning how humans are likely to behave.
For example, behaviourists such as Skinner tested the role of positive reinforcement in acquiring behaviours. His research was conducted on animals under tightly controlled laboratory experiments, and he argued that findings from these studies revealed general laws of learning which could be generalised to human behaviour as a whole.
How many different ways can get nomothetic approaches produce how many different ways of classifying behaviour?
3
What are the 3 ways the nomothetic approach can classify behaviour?
Classification of people into groups. (Mental disorders into distinct categories to define and label people as suffering from particular mental disorders)
Principles of behaviour (Like Skinner’s research revealed general laws regarding how behaviours were acquired, maintained and extinguished)
Scales of behaviour (IQ tests, personality type questionnaires can be used to quantify aspects of ability/personality)
What is the point of classifying behaviour?
Allow us to predict how a person is likely to behave.
What are criticisms of the nomothetic approach?
Overly scientific in its emphasis on measuring and predicting human behaviour. It can be argued that such an approach ‘de-humanises’ people and reduces human experience to a mechanic set of laws when it is, in fact, quite clear that human behaviour is much more individually meaningful and complex than biological or behavioural theories seem to suggest.
Therefore, idiographic methods focus on depth of understanding of people subjective experience of their own lives can be argued to produce a more well-rounded and meaningful picture of human psychology.
What are criticisms with the idiographic approach?
The fact that it focuses on individuals and then generalises to the population as a whole can be criticised for being unscientific and failing to acknowledge that behaviours an individual shows may not be typical of people in general. Thus, there is a danger that generalising from a sample of one is likely to produce invalid results.
Also idiographic approaches cannot produce valid laws of human behaviours as controlled experimentation is not conducted and findings cannot be tested for reliability.
Idiographic methods such as case studies and interviews can be criticised for being subjective, interpretative and possibly highly biased. For example, many argue that Frued interpreted Little Hans’ behaviour to provide evidence for his theory of the Oedipus Complex.
