Beyond Nomothetics and Idiographics: Towards a Systematization of Personality Research Approaches

Psychology is concerned with both general laws of psychological functioning and with the individual person. The debate surrounding nomothetics and idiographics has been brought up repeatedly, but it has never been completely resolved. We therefore aim to provide conceptual clarity on how the terms “idiographic” and “nomothetic” are used and how conflating these with other concepts negatively impacts research. By differentiating distinct inferential goals and research approaches, we disentangle these confounding concepts. We demonstrate that the nomothetic-idiographic distinction alone is insufficient for categorizing research approaches in personality science. Specifically, we present a categorization of research approaches based on (a) the focal entity (person(s) vs. population(s)) and (b) the type of generalization (no vs. entity-specific vs. cross-entity) resulting in a 2×3 matrix of research approaches. Finally, we propose a framework of 25 polytomous criteria to extend upon these two distinctions. This framework can be mapped onto the generic empirical research process and may help researchers to make decisions in the research process more explicit.