Methodological approach in management and quality sciences

The article presents methodological approach in management and quality sciences. Quantitative research aims to test hypothesised relationships between variables. Three areas can be identified for assessing the methodological rigour of this type of research: (1) theories relating to phenomena; (2) measures of concepts explaining the phenomena; (3) the reality analysed. it was found that the idiographic approach predominates in the group of theoreticians and represents 59.6 % (239 indications). The nomothetic approach, on the other hand, is used less frequently, accounting for 40.4 % of the responses (162 indications).

Development and Case Study Application of a Proxy-Generated Outcome Measure of Suffering for use with Clients with Illusory Mental Health

The concept of illusory mental health is described as the rationale for needing an approach for working with individuals who are unaware of their suffering and are therefore unable to describe their problems through self-report instruments. The use of a nomothetic approach using self-report or clinician-generated standardised instruments is compared with an idiographic approach for working with such individuals. A case study is used to illustrate the development and first application of a Proxy-Generated Outcome Measure (PGOM) that allows clinicians, observers and researchers to trace an individualised understanding of a client’s core sufferings and changes occurring during the process of psychotherapy. A comparison with a nomothetic outcome measure is also presented.

Network Approaches to Representing and Understanding Personality Dynamics

From its emergence at the beginning of the 20th century, personality scientists pursued two goals – a nomothetic approach that investigated the structure of individual differences between people in a population and an idiographic approach that explored variation within a person relative to him or herself. Implicit in both was an assumption that dynamic processes underlay the emergence of personality within and across people, but available methods at the time precluded testing dynamic questions. In this chapter, we first track the how the history of both nomothetic idiographic perspectives impacted the study of personality structure and dynamics. Next, we review findings and unanswered contemporary questions regarding nomothetic and idiographic structure, processes, and dynamics. Finally, we conclude by arguing for an idiographic network approach to understanding personality based in dynamic systems theory. We provide both theoretical questions for future research, some of which were proposed by early personality theorists but progressed slowly due to a lack of adequate methods, as well as cutting-edge techniques for actually testing them. We believe these methods capable of moving the study of personality dynamics – and personality more broadly -- forward.

Within-Person Variability

From its emergence at the beginning of the 20th century, personality scientists pursued two goals – a nomothetic approach that investigated the structure of individual differences between people in a population and an idiographic approach that explored variation within a person relative to him or herself. In this chapter, we first track the how the history of these two perspectives impacted the study of within-person variability. Next, we review findings and unanswered contemporary questions regarding within-person variability. Finally, we conclude by providing questions for future research, some of which were proposed by early personality theorists but progressed slowly due to a lack of adequate methods. We outline cutting-edge statistical models and idiographic techniques to move the study of within-person variability – and personality science – forward.

Are Nomothetic or Ideographic Approaches Superior in Predicting Daily Exercise Behaviors?

SummaryObjectives: The understanding of how stress influences health behavior can provide insights into developing healthy lifestyle interventions. This understanding is traditionally attained through observational studies that examine associations at a population level. This nomothetic approach, however, is fundamentally limited by the fact that the environment- person milieu that constitutes stress exposure and experience can vary substantially between individuals, and the modifiable elements of these exposures and experiences are individual-specific. With recent advances in smartphone and sensing technologies, it is now possible to conduct idiographic assessment in users’ own environment, leveraging the full-range observations of actions and experiences that result in differential response to naturally occurring events. The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that an ideographic N-of-1 model can better capture an individual’s stress- behavior pathway (or the lack thereof) and provide useful person-specific predictors of exercise behavior.Methods: This paper used the data collected in an observational study in 79 participants who were followed for up to a 1-year period, wherein their physical activity was continuously and objectively monitored by actigraphy and their stress experience was recorded via ecological momentary assessment on a mobile app. In addition, our analyses considered exogenous and environmental variables retrieved from public archive such as day in a week, daylight time, temperature and precipitation. Leveraging the multiple data sources, we developed prediction algorithms for exercise behavior using random forest and classification tree techniques using a nomothetic approach and an N-of-1 approach. The two approaches were compared based on classification errors in predicting personalized exercise behavior.Results: Eight factors were selected by random forest for the nomothetic decision model, which was used to predict whether a participant would exercise on a particular day. The predictors included previous exercise behavior, emotional factors (e.g., midday stress), external factors such as weather (e.g., temperature), and self-determination factors (e.g., expectation of exercise). The nomothetic model yielded an average classification error of 36%. The ideographic N-of-1 models used on average about two predictors for each individual, and had an average classification error of 25%, which represented an improvement of 11 percentage points.Conclusions: Compared to the traditional one-size-fits-all, nomothetic model that generalizes population-evidence for individuals, the proposed N-of-1 model can better capture the individual difference in their stressbehavior pathways. In this paper, we demonstrate it is feasible to perform personalized exercise behavior prediction, mainly made possible by mobile health technology and machine learning analytics.

“Incomprehensibility” as an approach to the contemporary understanding-explanation dichotomy

BackgroundTraditionally, “understanding” is related to the comprehension of the particular and of individualities as historical unique; “explanation” is conversely related to the sciences of general laws, preferential expressed mathematically. Within the “Methodenstreit”, first method is related to an idiographic second to a nomothetic approach. This dichotomy was transferred by Jaspers into psychiatry.ObjectiveHow the understanding-explanation dichotomy could be dialectically kept, but also surmounted in contemporary psychiatry and psychosomatics in the light of a broader concept of “comprehensibility” as dialectically opposed to “incomprehensibility”.MethodPossible steps in development of the understanding-explanation dichotomy are rebuilt historically from Neo-Kantian and hermeneutic approaches onwards. Starting from reflections on analytic action theory as well as from a critique of Descartian dualism of substance and from the assumption of incomprehensibility, we try to state an integrative conceptual network.ResultsWays of comprehensibility and incomprehensibility as well as understanding and not understanding are explored by crossing epistemological and ontological perspectives. Four implicit categories of understanding and a dialectically built conceptual network of dimensional dualities are stated.DiscussionThe methods of “understanding” and “explanation” maintain in contemporary psychiatry a heuristic importance, but not in a segregative manner. This epistemological dichotomy might be integrated in a network of superordinate dualities.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Telling people where to look in a soccer-based decision task: A nomothetic approach

Research has shown that identifiable visual search patterns characterize skilled performance of anticipation and decision-making tasks in sport. However, to date, the use of experts’ gaze patterns to entrain novices’ performance has been confined to aiming activities. Accordingly, in a first experiment, 40 participants of varying soccer experience viewed static images of oncoming soccer players and attempted to predict the direction in which those players were about to move. Multiple regression analyses showed that the sole predictor of decision-making efficiency was the time taken to initiate a saccade to the ball. In a follow-up experiment, soccer novices undertook the same task as in Experiment 1. Two experimental groups were instructed to either look at the ball, or the player’s head, as quickly as possible; a control group received no instructions. The experimental groups were fastest to make a saccade to the ball or head, respectively, but decision-making efficiency was equivalent across all three groups. The fallibility of a nomothetic approach to training eye movements is discussed.