ABSTRACT
In an ipsative analysis, an individual is compared to him-or herself, as opposed to being compared to other people. As compared with the stage and differential approaches to developmental psychology, the ipsative approach is much more idiographic in orientation. Idiographic laws are regularities associated with an individual instead of a group, and the goal of the ipsative approach is to discover individual (rather than group) laws or regularities of behavioral development. Those opting for an ipsative approach might argue that the nomothetic laws of individual behavioral development, which apply only to groups and not to the individuals within them, are meaningless; they would, thus, try to ascertain the variables involved in an individual’s development. If these findings could then be applied to larger groups of people (e.g., to better understand any qualifications in the application of group laws to individuals), so much the better for the science of human development. However, if the findings of ipsative research indicated that group laws were too general to be useful for understanding the character of an individual’s life course, then again so much the better for science. Here, the contribution would be, however, that scientists would not be misled by relatively vacuous general principles of human functioning.
