Idiographic vs. nomothetic

The distinctions between these two are that the idiographic approach focuses more on the individual characteristics of one person's personality, and the nomothetic approach works towards finding universal traits of personality. The strengths of the idiographic approach are that it may be used to find more in depth personality traits when doing a case study of one person, the weakness of this approach is that it is so time consuming that you may only complete a few case studies using this approach. Whereas with the nomothetic approach you are able to collect data from a larger group and come to many conclusions about personality that apply on a universal level. The weakness of the nomothetic approach is that it may be too reductionist, especially in terms of testing different cultures and populations, eg. Moghaddam mentions that when certain populations were provided with an MMRP form that it only caused a "culture shock" and resulted in no real data being collected. The nomothetic approach is also more atomistic in the sense that it assumes a small sample of shared personality traits are shared universally, similar to the psychoanalytic approach of Freud to individual personality, it does not allow for a larger degree of freedom. Whereas, the idiographic approach is almost too individualistic, because it focuses on only a small sample of the population and cannot in itself allow for discoveries in the field of personality psychology that are applicable to all humans.