Post by Chi Wu on Oct 14, 2017 2:53:17 GMT
The primary distinction between idiographic and nomothetic is that idiographic focuses on individual dispositions and nomothetic approach tries to find trends in people.
The idiographic approach is surely more individualist and atomistic since its goal is to get detailed pictures of individual personailty. However, its strength also becomes its weakness. The labor intense research limits the amount of study cases and makes this approch not universal.
The nomothetic approach, on the other hand, explores the general trends among large samples of people and therefore, it's holistic and reductionist. The strength would be that it's more applicable and universal but it might come short in profiling individual cases.