Issues and debates 1/2 Flashcards
(6 cards)
Outline and explain the nomothetic approach to psychological investigation.
How might researchers develop investigations through taking a nomothetic approach?
The nomothetic approach to psychological investigation aims to adopt a strict scientific approach when researching human behaviour.
The goal is to formulate general laws of behaviour, and so large, representative samples are sought.
The collection of quantitative data eg., through experimentation, allows for inferential statistical testing, which provides the opportunity to accept or reject operationalised hypotheses and state the significant findings to apply to population’s.
Many approaches use the nomothetic approach, including the biological and behaviourist approaches which seek to generalise their findings based on large studies analysing quantitative data
Outline and explain the idiographic approach.
What is one example of the idiographic approach?
On the other hand, the idiographic approach aims to carry out qualitative research to develop insight and collect rich information on smaller populations. Examples include case studies of single individuals with extreme maternal deprivation, or unstructured interviews carried out with small groups of people with schizophrenia to gain insight into what its like living with the disorder.
The goal of the research is therefore not to generalise but to develop deeper understanding of the issue being investigated.
What is one advantage of the nomothetic approach?
What is its criticism?
A strength of the nomothetic approach is that research can be used to create general laws of human behaviour, which may have more useful practical applications as they are generalisable to a larger group by the very design. For example, large scale studies have been used to develop drug treatments for schizophrenia for example, and large scale studies have shown that 1% of the population are likely to develop his disorder.
However as their purpose is not to look deeper to develop insight, nomothetic research can be criticised for losing sight of the individual and we require idiographic research in order to really understand what its like to live with schizophrenia.
What is an example that illustrates researchers contributing to the misunderstanding of psychology as a science.
Idiographic/nomothetic approaches.
Unfortunately some psychologists try to generalise from case studies, including Freud who used Little Hans to generalise that all boys experienced the Oedipus complex. This is neither in line with the goals of the idiographic nor nomothetic approaches and examples like this contribute to misunderstanding of psychology as a science.
What is a strength of both approaches.
What may limit this?
Idiographic/nomothetic approaches.
Whilst the nomothetic approach is considered more scientific as it fits with the feature of science theory construction, both approaches use empirical methods, conducting real world research, and hence both are scientific. Researcher bias should be avoided in research design and analysis, though this may be harder in idiographic research due to the close relationships which may form e.g., when conducting interviews.
Why can combining nomothetic and idiographic approaches be advantageous?
Nomothetic and idiographic approaches can work well together, contributing to our understanding of behaviour and to psychology as a discipline, they can complement one another by idiographic research helping us to gain insight into general laws established by the nomothetic research. E.g., with in depth interviews informing us what its like to experience relationship breakdown whilst nomothetic tells us the general stage we o through during a break up.
In addition a single case study can act to question or even falsify a theory (e.g., the case of KF challenging the multistore model of memory), and can lead to further theirs being proposed and research hypotheses suggested and testing.
By combining the approaches we are able to obtain both useful general laws and deeper insight into human behaviour
