Idiographic and Nomothetic

Question 1

Idiographic approaches are restrictive and not scientific

Answer 1

A criticism of the idiographic approach is that much of the work is narrow and restrictive. For example one of the criticisms levelled at Freud is that many of his key concepts, like the Oedipus complex were largely developed from the detailed study of a single case (Little Hans). Meaningful generalisations cannot be made without further examples, as there is no adequate
baseline with which to compare behaviour. Also the methods associated with the idiographic approach, such as case studies, tend to be the least scientific in that
conclusions often rely on the subjective interpretation of the researcher and, as such, are
open to bias. This suggests that if Psychology is to be considered to be a science, a nomothetic approach needs to be adopted which has more scientific rigour

Question 2

Idiographic approaches are restrictive and not scientific

Answer 2

A criticism of the idiographic
approach is that much of the work is narrow and restrictive. For example one of the criticisms levelled at Freud is that many of his key concepts, like the Oedipus complex were largely developed from the detailed study of a single case (Little Hans). Meaningful generalisations cannot be made without further examples, as there is no adequate
baseline with which to compare behaviour. Also the methods associated with the idiographic approach, such as case studies, tend to be the least scientific in that
conclusions often rely on the subjective interpretation of the researcher and, as such, are
open to bias. This suggests that if Psychology is to be considered to be a science, a nomothetic approach needs to be adopted which has more scientific rigour.

Question 3

The nomothetic approach allows us to make predictions

Answer 3

– A strength of the nomothetic
approach, is that, unlike the idiographic approach it allows us to make predictions because patterns of behaviour can be established. This is particularly useful for example in producing drugs to treat mental illness. In the case of schizophrenia the dopamine
hypothesis of schizophrenia believes that the cause of schizophrenia is thought to be the
same in all schizophrenics, and therefore from this we can predict that a drug treatment that addresses biochemical imbalance would be appropriate. It would be far too time consuming to produce personal therapies for unique individuals and therefore we need to make predictions about the most likely therapeutic solutions. This suggests that adopting the nomothetic approach is particularly beneficial in making predictions in order to work out who, and how to help people with mental health issues.