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Idiographic and Nomothetic - Coggle Diagram
Idiographic and Nomothetic
Idiographic:
Focuses on the individual and emphasises the unique personal experience of human nature
Research Methods that take an idiographic approach are looking at individual experiences and not trying to make laws for everyone
Open questions, unstructured interviews
Case studies
Thematic analysis
Nomothetic:
Concerned with establishing general laws, based on the study of large groups of people
Research Methods that take a nomothetic approach are trying to be scientific and create theories and general laws and about behaviour
Experiments
Closed questions, structured interviews
Correlations
Examples of Theories/Research:
Biological
- Nomothetic - Creates universal laws, as humans share similar physiologies
Human's have 'plastic' brains
Nicotine addiction caused by the desensitisation hypothesis
Behaviourist
- Nomothetic - Creates universal laws, as behaviour is the result of stimulus-response associations
Phobias are learnt by CC and maintained by OC
SLT
- Nomothetic - Attempts to establish general laws of behaviour (eg. vicarious reinforcement)
Aggression is learnt through imitation of role models (Bandura)
Cognitive
- Nomothetic and Idiographic - Attempts to establish general laws of cognitive processing but utilises an idiographic approach with case studies
Forgetting is a result of insufficient cues
CW showed that LTM has 3 components (procedural, semantic, episodic)
Psychodynamic
- Nomothetic and Idiographic - Attempts to establish general laws in relation to innate drives, while considering unique experiences (during childhood)
All children go through psychosexual stages
Little Hans - everyone has an oedipus and electra complex
Humanist
- Idiographic - Focuses on the subjective human experience and makes no attempt to create general laws
Person centred approach and everyone seeks self actualisation in their own time
Evaluation:
Idiographic -
S - The case study is powerful for evaluating theories, helping us to increase understanding of human behaviour and used to suggest further areas of research eg. KF
S - Extremely realistic giving high ecological validity, allowing more depth to be stablished eg. Rogers and Maslow spent hours having in depth conversations, contributing to understanding of MH
W - Unscientific as it is mostly based on qualitative research and may be biased (open to subjectivity, experimenter bias - especially if studied for a long period of time)
Nomothetic -
S - Used to create general laws of behaviour, helping to further our understanding of human behaviour eg. plasticity demonstrate general laws - to acceptance as established laws
S - More scientific due to quantitative data - high levels of control and predictions can be made eg. drug treatments
W - Approach may lose sight of the 'whole person', it cannot explain why all individuals act the way that they do (findings are often superficial) eg. types of delusions is an experience that differs for everyone