Topic Summaries

Idiographic vs. nomothetic approach

A-Level > Psychology > AQA > A-Level Psychology Topic Summaries > Issues and debates > Idiographic vs. nomothetic approach
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Addiction

  • The idiographic approach: people are studied as unique individuals and there’s no attempt to compare them to a norm or generalise behaviour. This is usually associated with qualitative research methods.
  • The nomothetic approach: seek to establish a general law of human behaviour and compare everyone to that law in order to predict behaviour. This is usually associated with quantitative methods.
  • Evaluation of idiographic vs.nomothetic debates:
    • The idiographic approach produces rich meaningful data contrasting to nomothetic methods, but findings may lack generalisability.
    • Nomothetic approaches tend to be more scientific so can be used to establish laws about human behaviour, but may overlook individual differences leading to a ‘one size fits all’ mentality.
    • A combined approach is often most effective (i.e. idiographic insights alongside nomothetic generalisations).

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