Idiographic And Nomothetic Flashcards
(14 cards)
Issue or debate
Debate
What does this debate
Asks psychological research of it should focus its attention to the individual or to the group. So should psychology concern itself with what makes people unique or should it concern itself with producing general principles and laws of human behaviour.
Definition of ideographic
Theses approaches focus more on the indivual case as a means of understanding behaviour. This is good as it means that individual differences are taken into account and people are treated as unique individuals
Definition of nomothetic
This approach aims to identify general laws for behaviour. They will carry out research and then make assumptions about how everyone will behave. This allows for treatments and interventions to be developed a the unique influences on human behaviour are ignored.
What are the 3 general laws of the nomothetic approach
Classification = people are put into groups depending on their behaviour (general rule for all)
Establishing principles = these laws and principles are applied to all human behaviour (treatments)
Establishing dimensions = attempts to place people on continuum so that people can be compared to others.
Research in ideographic
Small number of particpnats
Qualitative data
Case studies
Subjective (because focusing on individuals)
Humanistic approach
Research on nomothetic
Large groups of people
Quantitative
Questionnaires
Objective
Behavioural, biological, SLT
Examples of idiographic
HM = case study
Maslow heiarchy of needs = focuses on individuals self-actualisation
Case study of little hands
Examples of nomothetic
Skinners box = learning through consequences
SSRIs = broad treatment that is tested on large groups of people .
Types of attachment = everyone has a type of attachment (secure, avoidant, resistant)
Memory = applies to everyone
Strength of ideographic
P- detailed qualitative methods
E-They used open-ended questions and unstructured interviews, which are well-suited to qualitative research because they encourage detailed responses and allow for in-depth analysis of participants’ experiences and perspectives.
E- particpnats can express themselves freely and provide rich, detailed data
Limitation of ideographic
P- many concepts are deprived from the individual
E- case studies are specific to the individual and their differences, meaning that the results from one person and aren’t representative of a large population
E- these findings are subjective and can be generalised to a large group of people.
Strength of nomothetic
P- predicting behaviour
E- due to a lark population being used we can address how different people will respond to different situations, therefore can generalise the findings found to a wider population
E- this increases the population validty a it will b benefit in a lager group.
Limiation of nomothetic
P- not representative
E- some drug therapies that have been developed for a large population has found that its more effective on some then others
E- they should be more specific to the indivual and therefore be more effective
Conclusion
A psychologist argued that the ideographic and nomothetic debate is meaningless as psychologists should employ them both, depending the nurture of the question. However some psychological apporaches already apply them.
For example the cognitive approach = its typically seen as a nomothetic approach as it explains information processing for everyone, however it does implement some case studies (ideographic) such as HM to provide a further insight.
Another example is the psychodynamic approach = it’s typically seen as ideographic to identify the personal unconscious conflict. However there are general laws, such as we all experience superego, ID conflict.
