Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches

12 Key excerpts on "Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches"

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  Beyond Individual and Group Differences

  Human Individuality, Scientific Psychology, and William Stern′s Critical Personalism

  • James T. Lamiell(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Groups of individuals are studied, and the people are compared by applying the same concepts (usually traits) to each person . . . . Alternatively, some psy-chologists study personality without focusing on individual differences. The idiographic approach studies individuals one at a time, without making comparisons with other people. (Cloninger, 1996, p. 5; emphasis in original) 1 As long-standing and widely shared as these conceptions of idiographic and nomothetic are, they bear only a tenuous relationship to the meanings of the terms as Windelband himself originally understood them (Lamiell, 1998). As far as it goes, the definition of idiographic given above is consistent with Windelband’s conception, but that definition is also much narrower in scope than the meaning that the philosopher first intended. What is vastly more problematic is the fact that the definition of nomothetic given above articu-lates not at all with Windelband’s understanding as it would properly be applied to the knowledge objectives of a psychology of personality. This latter point is of surpassing importance and one that, fatefully, crit-ics of “mainstream nomotheticism,” including but not limited to Allport, consistently have either failed to fully appreciate or decided to overlook. The problem is that in referring to the doctrinaire common trait psychology of personality as a “nomothetic” approach, critics of that approach have only encouraged its practitioners to believe that it is, in fact, precisely what they have always most wanted it to be: nomothetic on the model of the natural sciences, and so in precisely the sense intended by Windelband. Branding adherents of the common trait approach as “nomotheticists” thus has been tantamount to throwing them into the proverbial briar patch.

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  Themes, Issues and Debates in Psychology

  • Richard Gross(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Barlow & Nock, 2009 ).

  The Humanistic personality theories of Maslow (1954 , 1968) and Rogers (1951 , 1961) (see Chapter 5 ) and Kelly’s (1955 ) Personal Construct Theory (see Chapter 1 ) also represent an idiographic approach and embody many of its basic principles and assumptions.

  QUESTION TIME

  • Are the nomothetic and idiographic approaches mutually exclusive: do we have to choose between them? Are there any personality theories that embody both approaches?
  • Does it make sense to talk about a totally unique person, someone whose personality has nothing in common with that of any other?
  • Must we agree with Allport (1937 ) that, since all science is nomothetic, and since Psychology should be concerned with the study of individuals, therefore Psychology cannot be a science?
  • What is the relationship between individual cases and general laws/principles in scientific practice?

  Have we stumbled upon a solution to the ‘riddle’ concerning the study of people – that in order to learn about people, Psychologists should not study people? If we distinguish between people as individuals and people as groups, then perhaps we have: we need to be clear whether our aim is to find out about this particular person, or how this person compares with others. While the idiographic approach takes the individual as its basic unit of analysis, for the nomothetic approach, it is groups of individuals; in the former, the data obtained represent a sample of the individual’s total set (‘population’) of emotions, cognitions, personality traits and so on, while in the latter, they represent a specified trait or behaviour as measured in a sample of individuals drawn from some larger population of individuals. This is the difference between a population of one (idiographic) and a population of many (nomothetic approach) (see Figure 3.1

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  Measuring Change in Counseling and Psychotherapy

  • Scott T. Meier(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • The Guilford Press

    (Publisher)

  198 Chapter 7 Idiographic Approaches to Measuring Change and Influencing Outcomes History and Background Reliability of Idiographic Measures Validity of Idiographic Measures Applications Summary and Implications History and Background In the history of psychological measurement, the nomothetic paradigm has dominated, accompanied by selection testing’s assumptions regarding the presence of the same traits in all individuals. The nomothetic approach has been effective for selection purposes. With large samples, one could usually find bell-shaped distributions of psychological characteristics, thus mirror- ing the natural distributions of phenomena found in other sciences. Use of multiple-item tests decreased random error, and group testing was efficient and inexpensive, at least compared to testing methods that focused on the use of a single test taker and assessor. But psychologists such as Allport (1937) took nomothetic proponents to task because of their emphasis on groups of individuals instead of the individuals themselves. Idiographic psychologists were interested in de- veloping laws that generalized across persons instead of groups of persons (Lamiell, 1990). As Danziger (1990) wrote, “If the subject is an individual consciousness, we get a very different kind of psychology than if the subject is a population of organisms” (p. 88). For Allport, there were no psychologi- cal laws to be found outside the study of individuals. Idiographic study and assessment usually occurs in the context of a relationship between assessor Idiographic Approaches 199 and individual. Such a relationship allows a greater understanding of the interaction between an individual’s perception of traits and other factors, such as psychological states and external situations, that change over time.

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  Criminal Profiling

  An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis

  • Brent E. Turvey(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Unfortunately, this basic construct of scientific thought and reason evades many in the criminal profiling community. In the previous chapter, we discussed how valid inferences are made and how scientific knowledge is built. In this chapter, we will discuss the two different types of knowledge that this creates: idiographic and nomothetic. We will further discuss the major styles of nomothetic profiling, with an exploration of their strengths and weaknesses. IDIOGRAPHIC VERSUS NOMOTHETIC STUDY In terms of the study of crime and criminals, or any subject for that matter, there are two major approaches of research and subsequent knowledge building. The first is nomothetic knowledge, referring to the study of the abstract: examining groups and universal laws. 1 The second is idiographic knowledge, referring to the study of the concrete: examining individuals and their actual qualities. Idiographic study concentrates on specific cases and the unique traits or functioning of individuals. According to Hurlburt and Knapp (2006, p. 287), “Psychologists use the term ‘idiographic’ to refer to the characteristics of unique individuals and ‘nomothetic’ to refer to universal characteristics.” Moreover, they explain that these terms have been a part of the American psychological landscape since as early as 1898. Consequently, these concepts have some history of application that we can learn from. Again, nomothetic studies are those conducted on groups, and idiographic stud-ies are those conducted on individuals. In terms of criminal profiling, it is fair to say that there are nomothetic methods and idiographic methods. A primary goal of idiographic (e.g., deductive) criminal profiling, as will be discussed in subse-quent chapters, is to study and determine the unique characteristics of the particu-lar offender(s) responsible for a specific crime.

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  Pursuit of Meaning

  Advances in Cultural and Cross-Cultural Psychology

  • Jürgen Straub, Doris Weidemann, Carlos Kölbl, Barbara Zielke, Jürgen Straub, Doris Weidemann, Carlos Kölbl, Barbara Zielke(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  The Idiographic Approach According to the idiographic or emic approach, ‘culture’ is not an exter-nal factor whose effects on the individual must be examined, but rather an integral part of human behavior (e.g., see Gergen 1985). Human acts cannot be separated from their cultural contexts. They are determined not by causes, which can be studied using the methods of the natural sci-ences, but rather by reasons, which are under the control of the acting individual, and must be understood through the eyes of the individuals under investigation. What is emphasized in this approach is human self-determination and self-reflection. In addition, the idiographic approach shows us that it is not only the subjects of the research who are culture-dependent, but also the whole system of psychological thought and its underlying assumptions. And these, of course, are informed by Western technological and scientific views of the world. So-called ‘indigenous’ psychology (cf. Berry et al. 1992: 380; Kagitcibasi and Berry 1989; Lonner and Adamopoulos 1996: 60) therefore attempts to explore cognition and behavior from the point of view of researchers from the culture under study, thus highlighting the relativity of insights gained from Western perspectives (see also Straub and Shimada 1999). Critique of the Nomothetic Approach The nomothetic approach is based upon a model of static influence. ‘Cul-ture’ is considered a set of independent variables whose influence on individual competencies and states can be investigated in terms of de- H ELFRICH -H ÖLTER : B EYOND THE D ILEMMA 255 pendent variables. However, there are two reasons, why ‘culture’ does not represent an independent variable in the usual sense. ‘Cultural Membership’ as an Organismic Factor The first reason is that cultural factors, such as ecological elements, child-rearing styles, or educational systems do not represent experimental treatment factors, but rather organismic variables.

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  Conceptual Issues in Psychology

  • Elizabeth R. Valentine(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Q-sort (Stephenson, 1953), in which statements are sorted according to their judged accuracy as self-descriptions. This is dimensional in its use of standard propositions and the injunction usually given to produce a quasi-normal distribution among sorts but might be considered morphogenic in that it makes use of self-report and can be used for measuring changes in the self-concept (Nunnally, 1955).

  Evaluation

  Holt (1967) argued that the idiographic-nomothetic issue is based on a false dichotomy, and that ‘these mischievous and difficult terms … had best disappear from our scientific vocabularies’. Truly idiographic methods cannot exist in science. A scientific method must be communicable and in principle generalisable. Allport’s so-called idiographic methods are merely more or less nomothetic methods applied to individual cases. With reference to one of the semi-morphogenic methods, he says: ‘The Q-sort is quite unacceptable in the traditional meaning of the term idiographic, and the use of the term to signify the fact that it is applied to individuals is simply grandiloquent prose’ (Holt, 1967). Idiography is merely a label indicating that interest is focused on the individual, but this is a question of subject matter. As different methods are not required and science is defined by its methods rather than by its subject matter, idiography, in Holt’s view, does not constitute a distinct science.

  Clinical Versus Statistical Psychology

  Similar to the idiographic–nomothetic issue in psychology is that labelled ‘clinical versus statistical’. Here it is argued that experimental conclusions apply to means which enable only actuarial predictions to be made and not exact outcomes with respect to the individual case. But as far as the individual is concerned the conclusion is either true or not true. Even though it may be impossible in practice to predict exactly the events of an individual life, this does not mean they are not determined.

  Clinical and statistical approaches may be contrasted with respect to methods and aims. The clinical can be distinguished from the statistical method

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  Concepts and Theories of Human Development

  • Richard M. Lerner(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Finally, although proponents of the differential approach pay greater attention to individual differences than do proponents of classic stage theories, it is the subgroup of individuals, and not the individual per se, that is of primary interest among differential researchers. However, quite a different interest in individuality is part of the idiographic (ipsative) approach.

  THE IDIOGRAPHIC (IPSATIVE) APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT

  In an idiographic approach to development, the individual, and his or her individuality, are of primary interest (Molenaar & Nesselroade, 2015; Rose, 2016). Developmental scientists taking an idiographic approach thus focus primarily on intraindividual (within-person) change. As such, the analytic approach to the individual is to compare him or her to himself or herself, respectively, across time. Such an approach involves ipsative analysis, that is, a comparison of a single person across two or more time points. As compared with the stage and differential approaches to developmental science, the idiographic (ipsative) approach seeks to identify what might be completely idiographic processes, or regularities, associated with an individual instead of a group.

  In other words, the goal of idiographic, ipsative analyses is to identify individual processes or regularities of development if and when they exist. Those opting for such an approach might argue that the nomothetic processes of individual behavioral development, which apply only to groups and not to the individuals within them, are meaningless (Rose, 2016); they would, thus, try to ascertain the variables involved in an individual’s development. If these findings could then be applied to larger groups of people (e.g., to better understand any qualifications in the application of group processes to individuals), so much the better for the science of human development (Molenaar & Nesselroade, 2015). However, if the findings of idiographic research indicated that group processes were too general to be useful for understanding the character of an individual’s life course, then again so much the better for science. Here, the contribution would be, however, that scientists would not be misled by relatively vacuous general principles of human functioning (Rose, 2016).

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  Reframing Adolescent Research

  • Leo B. Hendry, Marion Kloep(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In addition, proponents of RDS-based theories emphasize that, because of the dynamic character of each individual’s coactions with the specific features of his or her context, priority in the assessment of human development should be given to first analysing the idiographic components of a person’s developmental trajectory before attempting to aggregate information across groups or before making inferences about the general case of humanity (Molenaar and Nesselroade, 2015; Rose, 2016). Consistent with the Bornstein (2017) ‘specificity principle’, proponents of RDS-based models aim their research at identifying how specific outcomes of the process of development are linked to relations between specific attributes of a person and specific features of the multi-level context within which he/she is embedded. We shall discuss in more detail the importance of this specificity principle in regard to understanding the idiographic character of human development and its implications for applications (e.g. intervention or promotion programmes, or policies) aimed at enhancing human development.

  Here, however, we may note that the paradigmatic and meta-theoretical approach to developmental science that, at present, is at the fore of theoretical and empirical scholarship (Lerner, 2015) places a premium on (a) exploring the course of development for diverse groups of people and for the individuals within these groups, and on (b) elucidating the course of specific individual ⇔ context relations that are associated with variation in positive development for specific individuals within these groups. This exploration seeks to understand the specific opportunities to promote healthy and productive development across the life spans of these individuals and, in turn, seeks to identify the individual ⇔ context relations that represent barriers to the optimization of the lives of these individuals. Using the adolescent period as an exemplar, we shall discuss the bases of an idiographic approach to development and note the implications of this approach for research and application.

  Bases of an idiographic approach to youth development

  Kluckhohn and Murray (1948) observed that each person is like every other person, each person is only like some others, and each person is like no other person. In essence, Kluckhohn and Murray were suggesting that, in some respects, every human possesses universal or nomothetic characteristics; that is, characteristics that all humans have by virtue of species membership. Each human also possesses characteristics that place him or her in specific groups; that is, each person has differential characteristics. Finally, every human has characteristics that are specific to him or her; these are idiographic characteristics.

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  Adult Personality Development

  Volume 2: Applications

  • Lawrence S. Wrightsman(Author)
  • 1994(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  9 The Idiographic Approach to Personality Development It must always be foul to tell what is false and it can never be safe to suppress what is true. Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter 1 made the distinction between the nomothetic and idio-graphic approaches to the study of personality, and Chapter 8 examined the use of personal documents in the study of the single case. The purpose of this chapter is to examine other methods by which we understand an individual's personality, including oral histories, biographies, and case studies. Sources o f Information About a n Individual Life When we concentrate our study on the single case, we have a variety of sources from which to choose. We can arrange these on a continuum from self-generated materials (i.e., chosen by the sub-174 175 The Idiographic Approach ject being studied) to those chosen and initiated by the investigator. For example, diaries, letters, and memoirs, the topic of Chapter 8, reflect sources of information generated by the subject under study, generally created without any generalizable constraints. Oral histories and as told to autobiographies fall closer to the middle of the continuum. Certainly the mass of raw information comes from the subject under study, but the interviewer/researcher does determine, at least to some degree, what questions are asked, thus reducing the hazards of presenting inaccurate or uncritical information. At the same time, recent autobiographies of, for example, popu-lar athletes or movies stars permit the coauthor great latitude. The subjects tell their tales into a tape recorder and then excuse them-selves (Weisman, 1992). What appears may or may not be what the subject intended—or remembered. NBA basketball star Charles Barkley was so upset by passages in his own autobiography, when they were excerpted in a local newspaper, that he tried to block the publication of his own book, claiming he had been misquoted by his coauthor or ghostwriter.

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  Normal Personality Processes

  Progress in Experimental Personality Research

  • Brendan A. Maher, Winifred B. Maher(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  As is well known, those who have advocated a genuinely idiographic approach to the study of personality (most notably Gordon Allport) have steadfastly insisted that such an assumption is untenable, at least when it is made a priori. It is interesting to note in this connection that, when properly interpreted, the mass of correlational and (other) variance partitioning evidence available in the extant empirical literature of personality psychology constitutes an overwhelming in- dication that the idiographists have been correct on this matter all along. This comment undoubtedly warrants some amplification. It has been noted several times in this article that, under most definitions of the concept of personality, the relevance of any particular attribute to a description of an individual 's personality hinges in some way on the degree of consistency with which that individual manifests that attribute. It has also been explained that, with respect to the question of (in)consistency, all that can be reasonably safely inferred from the correlations, omega-square ratios, and generalizability coefficients thus far produced within the traditional nomothetic framework is that the individuals who have been assessed have not been equally (in)consistent in their manifestations of the vast array of attributes that have been measured. In combination, these two points lead directly to one conclusion: Research con- ducted within the nomothetic tradition has yet to yield a single personality attrib- IDIOTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY 55 ute that can properly be claimed, in the light of existing evidence, to be equally applicable to a description of all of the individuals assessed in any given study. It should be emphasized that there are only two conceivable ways around this conclusion.

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  Personality Psychology & Theory

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter-1 Introduction to Personality Psychology Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its areas of focus include: • Constructing a coherent picture of a person and his or her major psychological processes • Investigating individual differences , that is, how people can differ from one another. • Investigating human nature, that is, how all people's behaviour is similar. Personality can be defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations. The word personality originates from the Latin persona , which means mask. Significantly, in the theatre of the ancient Latin-speaking world, the mask was not used as a plot device to disguise the identity of a character, but rather was a convention employed to represent or typify that character. The pioneering American psychologist, Gordon Allport (1937) described two major ways to study personality, the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology seeks general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the principle of self-actualization, or the trait of extraversion. Idiographic psychology is an attempt to understand the unique aspects of a particular individual. ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ The study of personality has a broad and varied history in psychology, with an abundance of theoretical traditions. The major theories include dispositional (trait) perspective, psychodynamic, humanistic, biological, behaviorist and social learning perspective. There is no consensus on the definition of personality in psychology. Most researchers and psychologists do not explicitly identify themselves with a certain perspective and often take an eclectic approach.

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  Treatment of Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence

  • Mitchell J. Prinstein, Eric A. Youngstrom, Eric J. Mash, Russell A. Barkley, Mitchell J. Prinstein, Eric A. Youngstrom, Eric J. Mash, Russell A. Barkley(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • The Guilford Press

    (Publisher)

  There is considerable scientific evidence to guide clinicians in all of these assessment activities, with numerous psychometrically strong instru- ments available for use with most of these assess- ment tasks (Hunsley & Mash, 2018b; McLeod et al., 2013b). Importantly, many of the scientifically supported psychological assessment tools that can be used with children and adolescents are freely available (Beidas et al., 2015). Both nomothetic and idiographic measures play important roles in EBA (Hunsley, 2015; Hunsley 12 I. GENERAL PRINCIPLES & Mash, 2018b; McLeod et al., 2013b). Nomothet- ic measures, such as semistructured diagnostic in- terviews and symptom rating scales, are designed to assess constructs assumed to be relevant to most clients in order to facilitate comparisons on these constructs through the use of standardized criteria or norms. Idiographic measures, such as self-monitoring tools, behavioral observation, and individualized measures of treatment goals, can be designed to evaluate unique aspects of the client’s psychosocial functioning and specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors targeted for intervention. Although the nature of the data obtained with nomothetic measures differs dramatically from that obtained with idiographic measures, these complementary forms of data are essential infor- mation for case conceptualization purposes. No- mothetic data provide guidance on whether the severity of the client’s problems warrants treat- ment, and on which research domains are likely to be most pertinent for developing an initial con- ceptual framework for understanding the client and his or her distress (e.g., whether internalizing problems are more salient than externalizing prob- lems, whether the array of symptoms best maps onto a diagnosis of separation anxiety disorder or a depressive disorder).

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