The Nomothetic Approach in Personality Testing - 1573 Words

The Nomothetic approach is an approach to personality assessment. The term comes from the Greek word nomos which means law. In an online dictionary homothetic is defined as giving or establishing laws. Look for universal laws of behaviour. It is based on traditional, classical science. In psychology the nomothetic approach focuses on people in general, trying to find regularities or laws between people. The approach was proposed by a German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband in the 19th century. The American psychologist, Gordon Allport (1937) looked at these two major ways to study personality, the nomothetic and the idiographic. Nomothetic psychology looks for general laws that can be applied to many different people, such as the factor†¦show more content†¦The Big Five test also goes in line with the nomothetic approach in the sense that it is a quick self test questionnaire which is quantitative. Each answer made in the test is a closed answer so the manager can expect answers to be within a certain paradigm as opposed to an open questions test where the subject can give any random answer that the manager is not expecting. The nomothetic approach is also dominant in Type theories such as the Jung personality type theory. The theory was founded by Jung in his book psychological types, which was published in 1921. Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine C. Briggs developed a personality type test by constructing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) based on Jungs theory. The original theory consists of three functions, the introversion - extroversion function, the sensing - intuition function and the thinking - feeling function. Isabel Myers Katharine Briggs added a fourth function: perceiving - judging. This MBTI type model is different from trait models because the MBTI tells us that a person is either one type or the other. There are no in betweens like there is in trait theories. Type theories go in line with the nomothetic approach because it is possible to compare results with others. Some managers may argue that there is more to personality assessment than the nomothetic approach, not everything is as straight forward as it seems. This is because theorists/scientistsShow MoreRelatedPersonality Traits2403 Words   |  10 PagesIn psychology, personality traits could be explained from many aspects, and one of them describes personality traits as categorizations of people’s particular characteristics (Burger, 1997) while others hold opposite ideas that personalities are more unique and different for each individual depending on his or her peculiar life experience. 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