Idiographic approach to personality

  Allport also promoted another approach named as idiographic approach to the study of personality. Here every individual is regarded as a combined system that can be independently analysed scientifically. It means that each individual is examined deeply and no general laws are considered important that are beyond the individual to be studied.

Under the idiographic process, he believed that a person’s traits can be put into various compartments according to their pervasiveness in an individual’s personality. The most pervasive traits were referred to as “cardinal” dispositions by Allport. If present, cardinal traits dominate the behaviour of an individual aggressiveness, calmness etc. may be taken as examples. Another set of traits, known as “central dispositions” comprise those that are pervasive for a given individual. For example, the traits talked about while writing a letter of recommendation. More situational specific traits are termed as “Secondary dispositions”. Allport argued that each person possesses a unique pattern of cardinal, central and secondary traits and to understand a person, the unique-pattern examination is required.

Thus, the above discussion explains that the differences between a nomothetic and an idiographic approach is not just a question of discovering on the part of the psychologist, but also the methods employed are considered useful. The nomothetic point of view has experiments, correlation, psychometric testing and other quantitative methods as its examples. On the other hand, the idiographic methods include case studies, informal interviews, unstructured observation and other qualitative methods.

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