The nomothetic (Greek term meaning lawgiving ) approach to science seeks scientific truth (lawfulness) by testing hypotheses. It applies general formulations developed through research to particular cases and uses deductive reasoning to predict what will happen in the case based on the general rule or proposition formulated.
The idiographic (Greek term for one or more specifically oneself , one's own ) approach seeks scientific truth (lawfulness) by inspecting individual cases and finding the general patter behind their occurrence and it uses inductive reasoning. General rules are inferred from individual cases.
http://srmo.sagepub.com/view/encyclopedia-of-measurement-and-statistics/n312.xml
The Idiographic / Nomothetic Dichotomy: Tracing Historical Origins of Contemporary Confusions
Oliver C. Robinson, University of Greenwich
History & Philosophy of Psychology (2011) Vol. 13(2), 32–39.
There has been a false tendency to see these two terms as antagonistic rather than complementary. The
confusions over the term ‘nomothetic’ stem from a long-held misconception that nomothetic research requires large samples and group-based statistics such as means and variances (i.e. the ‘Galtonian’ paradigm). But nomothetic research has another paradigm at its disposal that can be termed the ‘Wundtian’ paradigm, which relies on smaller samples, and a case-by-case form of analysis (Lamiell, 2003).
The confusion over the term ‘idiographic’ stem from an enduring but incorrect sense that it is opposed to nomothetic inquiry.
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