Idiographicxnomothetic Debate Essay

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By Nurfatehah The idiographic and nomothetic approaches are often regarded as representing opposing and conflicting positions about how best to study people. The idiographic approach aims for empathetic understanding while the nomothetic approach try and establish general laws based on cause and effect relationships. The idiographic approach focuses on the individual and recognises the uniqueness of the person in terms of their experiences, feelings, developmental history, aspirations and motivations in life, and the values and the moral code by which they live. This approach is also concerned with the private, subjective, and unique aspects of the individual. The idiographic approach tends to use methods that are qualitative. These include unstructured interviews, case studies, and introspection. An example of this is Piaget's study of cognitive development in children. He carried out longitudinal studies on his children over a period of several years keeping frequent notes of his observations and the clinical interviews. In doing so, he gained rich and detailed information about the development of his children's thinking. A holistic perspective on the person is adopted in this approach, and places great value on the conscious experiences reported by the individual. It does not reduce people to one aspect, such as genes, that can be generalised to all people. Cross cultural differences support this idea. The aim for the idiographic approach is understanding and finding the ways we are unlike anyone else. This approach is exemplified by the humanistic approach with it's holistic views of a person and placing great value on the person, which resulted in the Person Centred Therapy. Freudian psychoanalysis can be said to adopt an idiographic approach also as Freud used the case study method to gain information about his patients. His techniques were
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