Being more idiographic in the nomothetic world

• Authors: Tomasz Korulczyk , Adam Biela , Neville Blampied

Abstracts

EN

Since psychology emerged as an independent field of knowledge, there has been no consensus as to how it should develop, either, in the idiographic or nomothetic way. In the course of time, due to a commitment to what was seen as objectivity in science, the nomothetic approach came to dominate psychology. Thus, researchers used mostly quantitative psychometric methods to establish general rules of human behaviour. In doing so, the essence of nomothetic research is to be extremely careful when interpreting results not to make a reasoning mistake such as the ecological fallacy, as may happen when a researcher draws conclusions about nature of the individual in the group based on average results of the whole group. In the article, we presented two methods for longitudinal research designs which address this problem, and give more idiographic information about participants; via the Reliable Change Index and the Modified Brinley Plot. Finally, we provide a IBM SPSS Statistics syntax automatizing the whole process of computation for these new features.

Keywords

EN

longitudinal research; Modified Brinley Plot; Reliable Change Index; idiographic approach; IBM SPSS Statistics

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk
• Journal: Polish Psychological Bulletin
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 50
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 207-216

Dates

published

2019

Contributors

author

Tomasz Korulczyk

author

Adam Biela

author

Neville Blampied

Identifiers

Biblioteka Nauki

2129704