The Case for an Idiothetic Psychology of Personality: A Conceptual and Empirical Foundation

Abstract

This chapter discusses the psychology of personality. The chapter presents three critical facets of the overriding meta theoretical objectives of the scientific study of personality: (1) the discipline requires a viable framework for empirical personality description; (2) given such a framework, programmatic personality research should be directed toward an understanding of the process of personality development; and (3) the scientific study of personality seeks ultimately to establish general principles that contribute to an understanding of human behavior/psychological functioning at the level of the individual. The chapter also presents formal properties of the alternative measurement models that could conceivably be brought to bear on the task of empirical personality. The discussion was concluded by noting that, as any one of the alternative measurement models could in principle be used as the basis for constructing attributes-by-measurement occasion profiles for single individuals, any one of those models could therefore be defended, in principle, as a formal approach to the problem of empirical personality description.