Experience Sampling Methods: A Modern Idiographic Approach to Personality Research

Experience sampling methods are essential tools for building a modern idiographic approach to understanding personality. These methods yield multiple snapshots of people's experiences over time in daily life and allow researchers to identify patterns of behavior within a given individual, rather than strictly identify patterns of behavior across individuals, as with standard nomothetic approaches. In this article, we discuss the origin and evolution of idiographic methods in the field of personality and explain how experience sampling methods function as modern day idiographic methods in this field. We then review four primary ways in which experience sampling methods have been used to foster idiographic approaches in personality research. Specifically, we highlight approaches that examine individual differences in temporal and behavioral distributions, situation–behavior contingencies, daily processes, and the structure of daily experience. Following a brief methodology primer, we end by discussing future directions for idiographic experience sampling approaches in personality psychology and beyond.     

Conceptual Issues in Studying Continuity and Discontinuity in Personality Development Across Life

In this article, we argue that the continuity-discontinuity of personality development is not just an empirical issue, but is also a metatheoretical and theoretical issue. Stances taken in regard to one of three metatheories (or models)--the organismic, the mechanistic, and the developmental contextual--determine theoretical ideas about (a) the units of analysis thought to be relevant to personality development; (b) the processes believed to govern these units; and (c) whether changes in these units are continuous or discontinuous. Theories associated with the models also differ in regard to whether they describe and/or explain intra-individual personality changes as quantitatively or qualitatively continuous or discontinuous. Developmental contextual theories seek to identify the organismic and contextual conditions under which any instance of continuity-discontinuity occurs. These conditions involve both nomothetic and idiographic processes. Organism-context relations must be studied longitudinally in order to understand how these processes function across life.     

The Nomothetic-Idiographic Debate in Family Therapy

This essay introduces the terms "nomothetic" and "idiographic" to characterize the current debate about whether the field of family therapy should accumulate and apply knowledge about patterns of adjustment that hold across different families, or whether the field should consider each family as utterly unique, and should tailor interventions solely on the basis of these unique qualities. Embedded in this debate are the arguments for and against quantitative research, disagreements about the value of clinical prediction and interobserver reliability, as well as the issue of whether therapists can rightfully claim to possess "expert knowledge." The essay begins with the personal-professional anecdote that stimulated me to explore this debate in greater depth. It continues with a brief discussion of the historical context of this debate, particularly noting the parallels between the methodological issues in personality research and those facing family therapy. The nomothetic-idiographic debate in family therapy theory, research, and practice is then described. The essay ends with the suggestion that family therapy view nomothetic and idiographic thinking as complementary, and that the field strive to develop an integrated, "idiothetic" approach to family therapy research and practice.     

Individual differences in metacontrast: An impetus for clearly specified new research objectives in studying masking and perceptual awareness?

While the majority of perceptual phenomena based research on consciousness is implicitly nomothetic, some idiographic perspective can be sometimes highly valuable for it. It may turn out that after having had a closer look at individual differences in the expression of psychometric functions a need to revise some nomothetic laws considered as the general ones arises as well. A study of individual differences in metacontrast masking published in this issue superbly illustrates this. A myriad of urgent research objectives emerges out of this study, most of them important both for clearing up the still messy theoretical picture on visual masking and for the beginning of asking whether perceptual awareness mechanisms are so universal at all. In this commentary the problems pertinent to this issue are discussed.     

Idiographic complexity and the common personality dimensions insensitivity,extraversion, neuroticism,and orderliness

This paper reports on an attempt to investigate empirically whether the common personality dimensions S or Insensitivity, E or Extraversion, N or Neuroticism, and G or Orderliness, as postulated in Van Kampen's modification of Eysenck's PEN model, would in principle give rise to the same level of predictive accuracy as a set of personal traits obtained in each of a series of assessments of separate individuals. Using a special methodology to ‘convert’ the nomothetic dimensions into factors that are of idiographic relevance, (within‐person) correlations and multiple correlations between the idiographic traits and the nomothetic dimensions S, E, N, and G (predictors) were computed in a sample of 83 subjects. Results showed that the idiographic traits could be expressed in most cases as linear combinations of the four idiographically converted nomothetic factors, and that the degree to which an individual's idiographic data could be explained nomothetically was unrelated to this individual's conformity to the nomothetic zero‐correlational structure of the four dimensions. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Making the case for using personalised outcome measures to track progress in psychotherapy

The practice-based evidence movement has become increasingly influential in the practice of counselling. One element of this approach is the recommendation that therapists regularly administer standardised or nomothetic measures to track the progress made by their clients. When this feedback indicates that therapy is off course (i.e. out of kilter with the projected course of effective treatment) therapists are alerted to the risks of potential dropout and encouraged to take some form of corrective action. Despite an expanding evidence base supporting this strategy for improving psychotherapeutic outcomes, there are also concerns that the generic measures adopted do not always possess the specificity and sensitivity required to capture the unique experiences of individual clients. The paper argues that personalised or idiographic assessments can be designed to match the language and priorities of individual clients and so provide a more nuanced measure with which to track the course of therapy and promote informed reflective conversations between client and clinician on when and whether a change in direction is needed. However the idiographic alternative is not an easy option and practical as well as theoretical challenges in adopting this approach to monitoring treatment outcomes are acknowledged and discussed. Finally the virtue of using a strategy that combines nomothetic and idiographic measures is considered.     

Bringing Back the Person into Behavioural Personality Science Using Big Data

Behaviour and the individual person are important but widely neglected topics of personality psychology. We argue that new technologies to collect and new methods to analyse Big (Behavioural) Data have the potential to bring back both more behaviour and the individual person into personality science. The call for studying the individual person in the history of personality science, the related idiographic/nomothetic divide, as well as attempts to reconcile these two approaches are briefly reviewed. Furthermore, different meanings of the term idiographic and some unique selling points that emphasize the importance of idiographic research are highlighted. A nonexhaustive literature review shows that a wealth of behaviours are considered in extant personality studies using such Big Data but only in a nomothetic way. Against this background, we demonstrate the potential of Big Data collection and analysis with regard to four idiographic research topics: (i) unique manifestations of common traits and the resurgence of personal dispositions, (ii) idiographic prediction, (iii) intraindividual consistency versus variability of behaviour and (iv) intraindividual personality trait change through intervention. Methodological, ethical and legal pitfalls of doing Big Data research with individual persons as well as potential countermeasures are considered.     

Managerial Personality and Performance: A Semi-idiographic Approach

Understanding the relationship between personality and behavior requires accounting for a broad set of traits within each person and the demands of a specific role or situation. To address these requirements, we assessed the relevance or ordering of traits within an individual (an idiographic approach) and compared these orderings across individuals occupying similar organizational situations (a nomothetic approach). We illustrate the utility of this semi-idiographic approach with a longitudinal study of Masters of Business Administration (MBA) students. The MBAs whose personalities were more similar to a template of the successful young manager received more job offers upon graduating and, subsequently, earned higher salaries, were more likely to be working full-time, and had changed jobs less often than did those who fit the managerial template less well.     

Nesselroade and Molenaar's Measurement Concerns and Proposals: An Introduction

In this special section Nesselroade and Molenaar (N & M) propose a provocative new approach to measurement invariance. When measures are collected repeatedly over time (e.g., daily diary studies), a potentially unique measurement model relating the items to the underlying construct can be created for each individual. If hypothesized causal paths specified between constructs (e.g., frustration → aggression) can be constrained to be equal across the individuals, a model with idiographic measurement of the constructs, but with nomothetic structural relationships can be specified. Three commentaries react to N & M's proposal. Revelle and Wilt challenge the priority given by N & M to unique individual measurement structures, arguing that between subjects differences in structural relationships are empirically important and meaningful. Markus's uses David Hume's framework to raise philosophy of science challenges for N & M's approach. Maydeu-Olivares challenges the incremental validity of N & M's approach, arguing that N & M's approach is unlikely to improve the prediction of between subjects criteria. Finally, N & M present a rejoinder to the three commentaries.     

The Challenge of Integrity: A Commentary on the Critique by Edwards and Lowis

Capps' idiographic analysis of Augustine's Confessions is discussed in terms of Allport's possible contradiction in stating idiographic goals while embracing nomothetic theory and techniques. The necessity of a methodological complementarity for this type of work is stressed to reduce subjective bias. The question of Augustine's religious orientation is then extended to include recent ideas. As interesting as idiographic treatments are, their most productive use may be for theory development to which nomothetic analyses are applied.     

Individual Pooling for Group-Based Modeling Under the Assumption of Ergodicity

Psychology principally utilizes nomothetic, interindividual approaches to model phenomena of interest. However, it is the case that these approaches do not always capture the processes for each individual in the sample. If the research is focused on individual processes, confining analysis to the idiographic level may be more appropriate. One way to overcome the nomothetic inability to capture idiographic processes is to identify those participants who meet the criteria of ergodicity and restrict analysis to the resulting sample. Under these conditions it is quantitatively justifiable to create a group model without concern that it may fail to represent each member's idiographic process. In this study we explore the utility of such a method by (a) applying an ergodic pooling test to a sample of dyads (N = 128) who provided daily (T = 50) self-reports of affect, (b) applying an ergodic pooling test to samples (N = 4) of simulated ergodic time series data (T = 50, 250, and 1,000), (c) modeling dyads and simulated subgroups identified as ergodic, and (d) comparing the results from a model specified at the group level with those from models specified at the individual level.     

Enhancing mental health and well-being outcomes for psychotherapy and counselling through idiographic analysis: A four-quadrant approach

Mental health and well-being outcomes in psychotherapy and counselling have largely been studied through the use of standardised nomothetic measurement. A key limitation is that nomothetic measurement and current statistical analyses do not necessarily capture the outcomes of the complicated and individual psychotherapy processes. There is an increased interest in the use of idiographic patient-reported outcome measures (I-PROMs), which are uniquely useful because they may explore areas of importance that are unexplored by nomothetic outcome measures. We argue that to optimise the value of I-PROMs, it is necessary to consider their contribution alongside standardised nomothetic measures. However, there are important considerations with respect to whether or not I-PROMs from different clients, or indeed from the same client, can be meaningfully explored at a team/service level, and alongside standardised nomothetic outcomes. We provide worked examples on real client data to show that delineating four quadrants of analysis is important to explore the breadth of information: (a) individual progress on single items, (b) individual progress by aggregated scores, (c) team/service-level progress by goal item/theme and (d) team/service-level progress by aggregated scores.     

Representing the internal world: Response to Seligman

Two major points raised by Seligman in his commentary are discussed. First, attachment research has developed empirical methods for studying internal representations. In our view, this adds to our understanding rather than overvalues attachment as a construct or as a methodological approach. Second, we suggest that nomothetic (the study of general laws which hold for groups of individuals) and idiographic (the study of specific laws which hold for individuals) approaches to knowledge are complementary rather than competitive and that each will make use of certain observations in different ways. We point out that the purpose of the Journal's Special Issue that occasioned Seligman's commentary was to acquaint readers with empirical advances in the study of internal representations. We look forward to a continuing dialogue among clinicians, researchers, and theoreticians.     

Individual response profiles in the behavioral assessment of personality

A long-standing problem in the behavioural assessment of personality is the individual specificity of responses. Often, different persons externalize the same trait in different responses. One solution to this problem is to aggregate many different responses. The paper compares the power of response aggregation for predicting self-and other-ratings of personality with two alternative strategies of response selection: the nomothetic strategy of selecting the response with the highest overall predictive power, and the more idiographic strategy of selecting, for each individual, the most extreme response. Seventy subjects were videotaped in a sequence of social situations inducing shyness to various degrees. Five different nonverbal measures of shyness all correlated significantly with the subjects' self- or other-rated shyness, and showed low correlations across subjects and a substantial cross-situational consistency of response profiles. Response aggregation and both strategies of response selection were found to be equally powerful in predicting the subjects' self- and other-ratings of shyness from the five behavioural responses. Therefore, these findings somewhat dampen the hope often expressed in recent theoretical discussions of personality assessment that more respect for the individual case may improve nomothetic assessment procedures.     

Predictors of competitive anxiety direction in male Tae Kwon Do practitioners: a multilevel mixed idiographic/nomothetic interactional approach

Objectives: To examine (a) affective states, proximity of competition and personality traits as predictors of anxiety direction and (b) investigate the role of personality characteristics in moderating the relationship between anxiety direction and proximity of competition and affective states.Method: A multilevel mixed idiographic/nomothetic approach. Intensity and direction of competitive anxiety and positive (PA) and negative affect (NA) were monitored in 22 male Tae Kwon Do practitioners across a week preceding a major competition using the experience sampling method (ESM). The participants were assessed on neuroticism and extraversion. Negative and positive affect and anxiety intensity and direction were measured at three random times a day across 1 week before the competition and 1 hour pre-competition.Results: Multilevel regression analyses revealed that cognitive anxiety intensity, positive affect, proximity to competition and extraversion were significant predictors of cognitive anxiety direction. Significant interaction effects of proximity to competition and neuroticism, and neuroticism and negative affect on cognitive anxiety direction were also observed. Somatic anxiety direction was a function of positive affect, somatic anxiety intensity, proximity to competition and the interaction effects of neuroticism and somatic anxiety intensity and neuroticism and proximity to competition.Conclusions: A multilevel mixed idiographic/nomothetic interactional approach may substantially assist in the explanation of intra- and inter-individual differences in anxiety direction.     

Assessing Achievement Goals in Sport: Caveats for Consultants and a Case for Contextualization

This paper advises practitioners of the limitations of employing nomothetic research tools for the idiographic assessment of athletes' achievement goal orientations. Consultants are encouraged to appreciate the scoring trends of the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire (TEOSQ; Duda & Nicholls, 1992) and the Perceptions of Success Questionnaire (POSQ; Roberts, Treasure, & Balague, 1998) and to recognize that the measures may not bestow them with accurate and meaningful information on an athlete's motivational responses in the contexts of competition and practice. The contextual sensitivity of the TEOSQ and the POSQ is explored empirically among a sample of 179 high-level team and individual athletes. Repeated measures ANOVAs with follow-up paired t -tests illustrated how performers' goal orientations for competition differed significantly from their overall sport goal orientation. The findings are discussed with reference to the implications for practitioners and the development of appropriate contextual assessments of achievement goals at nomothetic and idiographic levels.     

Relative Effectiveness of Emotion Induction Procedures and the Role of Personal Relevance in a Clinical Sample: A Comparison of Film, Images, and Music

Qualitative differences between three types of media used for the laboratory induction of emotion (film clips, still images, and music) were explored using a clinical sample. The relative effectiveness at inducing negative emotion and the degree to which the induction elicited personally relevant experiences of emotion was examined. Nomothetic and idiographic media were included as stimuli, and comparisons were made across media types and selection type. Nomothetic and idiographic media did not significantly differ in levels of negative affect endorsed. Significant differences did emerge between media and selection types in degree of personal relevance, with nomothetic images rated lowest and idiographic music rated highest. Significant differences also emerged in ratings of positive affect, with greater personal relevance significantly related to greater positive affect. The qualitative differences in emotion induction procedures found in this study are discussed in relation to the potential importance of matching emotion induction procedures to specific emotion-related processes of interest when used for the laboratory study of emotion and psychopathology.     

A borderline policeman: AKA, a cop with no COP

Lest the Rorschach partisan engage in splitting and deem one approach to clinical data as all good and the other as all bad, it is urged that atheoretical, nomothetic and theory-saturated, developmentally based, idiographic approaches be integrated to animate, enrich, and organize the mature psychodiagnostician's yield. This approach is illustrated by exploring the borderline personality organization of a 46-year-old police officer fearing fragmentation and loss of control.