Idiographic Approach

The idiographic approach describes research goals that focus on the individual rather than focusing on or generalizing individual results to the entire population (which is called the nomothetic approach). A nomothetic approach (used in personality psychometrics like the Big Five personality traits uses personality characteristics and generalizes them from the individual to the population as a whole. Idiographic research focuses on the uniqueness of the individual rather than developing theories of behavior than can be generalized to the population.