Idiographic and Nomothetic Approaches in Science
Reflecting the distinction between 'objectivist' and 'subjectivist' approaches to science, the idiographic and the nomothetic represent two contrasting approaches to study methods.
Idiographic approaches argue that the ultimate goal of science is to explain individual events; general laws and theories are useful insofar as they help us understand a particular event. By copntrast, nomothetic approaches argue that the ultimate goal is to uncover general truths that cover classes of occurrence. Here, individual instances are of interest primarily as guides in developing a broader understanding. Clinical medicine is largely an idiographic pursuit, and the doctor’s commitment is to the individual patient. Basic sciences such as physiology or epidemiology are nomothetic disciplines that focus on general underlying principles of how the body functions. As a discipline (such as social epidemiology) develops, it explanations will tend to move from an idiographic toward a nomothetic pattern as its theoretical base is established.
Related to this distinction is that between emic and etic approaches. These concepts derived originally from linguistics and describe alternative approaches to linguistic analysis. An etic approach (phonetic) describes the physical properties of the object, without referring to its functional purpose. In the context of language, the etic analysis might describe the pitch and tone of someone’s speech. The emic approach takes account of the context, meaning and purpose of the object; in analysing someone’s speech it would focus on those patterns that are used to signal meaning. In social epidemiology, the contrast might be between a descriptive approach to life events, and an interpretation that takes account of the personal meaning of the event to the person, rather than merely its form. It would argue, for example, that scoring all instances of a particular life event in the same way would be inappropriate. Another health example is the relevance of an outcome measure. Take the six-minute walk test, for example. This can give an accurate picture of an elderly lung patient's fitness and their lung function. However, very few elderly people actually have to walk for six minutes non-stop; this etic test does not tell us the types of difficulty they will have in actul life (the emic approach) in which the challenges include getting up and down stairs, in and out of chairs, more than making route marches.
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