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Idiographic or Nomothetic?

19 October, 2015 - 17:36

Once you decide whether you will conduct exploratory, descriptive, or explanatory research, you will need to determine whether you want your research to be idiographic or nomothetic. A decision to conduct idiographic research means that you will attempt to explain or describe your phenomenon exhaustively. While you might have to sacrifice some breadth of understanding if you opt for an idiographic explanation, you will gain a much deeper, richer understanding of whatever phenomenon or group you are studying than you would if you were to pursue nomothetic research. A decision to conduct nomothetic research, on the other hand, means that you will aim to provide a more general, sweeping explanation or description of your topic. In this case, you sacrifice depth of understanding in favor of breadth of understanding.

Let’s look at some specific examples. As a graduate student, I conducted an in-depth study of breast cancer activism (Blackstone, 2003). 1 To do so, I joined an organization of local activists and participated in just about every aspect of the organization over a period of about 18 months. Perhaps it goes without saying, but over the course of a year and a half of participant observation, I learned quite a bit about this organization and its members. In other words, the study revealed the particular idiosyncrasies of the group, but it did not reveal much about the inner workings of other breast cancer activist organizations. Armed with an in-depth understanding about this single group, the study made a contribution to knowledge about how activists operate. For one thing, the organization I observed happened to be one of the largest and most well known of its type at the time, and many other organizations in the movement looked to this organization for ideas about how to operate. Understanding how this model organization worked was important for future activist efforts in a variety of organizations. Further, the study revealed far more intimate details of the inner workings of an activist organization than had it, say, instead been a survey of the top 50 breast cancer organizations in the United States (though that would have been an interesting study as well).

My collaborative research on workplace sexual harassment (Uggen & Blackstone, 2004), 2 on the other hand, aims to provide more sweeping descriptions and explanations. For this nomothetic research project, we mailed surveys to a large sample of young workers who look very much like their peers in terms of their jobs, social class background, gender, and other categories. Because of these similarities, we have been able to speak generally about what young workers’ experiences with sexual harassment are like. In an idiographic study of the same topic, the research team might follow a few workers around every day for a long period of time or conduct a series of very detailed, and lengthy, interviews with 10 or 15 workers.