Title: The Idiographic / Nomothetic Dichotomy: Tracing Historical Origins of Contemporary Confusions
Abstract: The relevance of idiographic and nomothetic forms of science has been the subject of fierce debates within psychology, and there has been a false tendency to see these two terms as antagonistic rather than complementary. The origins of contemporary confusions over the term ‘nomothetic’ stem from a long-held misconception that nomothetic research requires large samples and group-based statistics such as means and variances (i.e. the ‘Galtonian’ paradigm), when in fact nomothetic research has another paradigm at its disposal that can be termed the ‘Wundtian’ paradigm, which relies on smaller samples, and a case-by-case form of analysis (Lamiell, 2003). Meanwhile, the historical origins of confusion over the term ‘idiographic’ stem from an enduring but incorrect sense that it is opposed to nomothetic inquiry, combined with an increasing tendency to use the word in ways that bear no relation to its original meaning. The contemporary situation could be substantially improved if Psychology was to re-locate the Wundtian model back to its rightful central position in the discipline.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 48
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