Also from a behavioral perspective, the intervention may be seen as limited in that
idiographic case conceptualizations were not employed to tailor interventions to individual participants' skill strengths, deficits, and competing sources of stimulus control and reinforcement.
The answer to these challenges may be found with an
idiographic approach that uses individualized tools to involve clients in the process of tailoring assessments to their own unique realities.
(3.) By the way, Barlow also added a couple new words to my passive, if not my active, vocabulary--"
idiographic" and "nomothetic." In psychology,
idiographic describes the study of the individual, who is seen as a unique agent with a unique life history, with properties setting him/her apart from other individuals.
The mirror image is the criticism of the
idiographic social sciences as providing only non-generalizable, particularistic descriptions that offer no guide to social action.
An example of this
idiographic process is presented in the Appendix 1, with all the other analyses recorded in an Excel form.
(1997) observed that reviewers applied nomothetic criteria (as if all manuscripts were statistical studies of populations) when evaluating
idiographic research (case studies, historical studies, and scholarly discussion).
To Brenner (2013), such mobilizations of everyday lived experience--particularly of
idiographic 'categories of practice'--to understand the urban phenomenon and to dismantle rural-urban binaries might be considered deeply inadequate to address the theoretical challenge that Lefebvre sets for us.
This study reinforces the need to incorporate person-oriented methodological approaches to fully capture
idiographic differences in positive development among youth (Molenaar, 2009).
Nomothetic versus
idiographic: Scholars use nomothetic methods to generalize and seek association between factors.
The approach of clinical practices and studies that aim to find results on an individual basis by working with each case individually is
idiographic. The specific purpose of such studies is to diagnose each case accurately in other words, to be able to diagnostically categorize cases in accordance with their disorders.
Clinical psychologists are interested in both nomothetic and
idiographic truths--what is true about people in general, and what is true in particular cases and contexts.
Part 1 lays out relevant concepts and methods, including nomothetic and
idiographic assessment of meanings, process of building and maintaining the therapeutic relationship, descriptive case formulation and frameworks, and transdiagnostic assessment including implications for those who continue to work with a disorder-specific approach.
In some other context, I made reference to Windelband's [23] distinction between the nomothetic and the
idiographic: "der Gegensatz des Imergleichen und des Einmaligen" (the opposite of the unchanging and the unique).
