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Nomothetic is derived from a Greek word “nomos” or law or general law. Thus, nomothetic study of personality is an approach to establish general principles or law about human personal attributes and characteristics which, through many and acceptable research work, lead to the formation of a theory.
Introduction
During early period of studies on human personality, the focus was on understanding the nature and characteristics of people – with the assumption that people seem to possess personality basic templates or traits that are common, shared, and universal among different cultures globally. Nomothetic approach was introduced by Allport in 1937 to identify general pattern of personality across different groups of individuals. The approach is more of quantitative in nature because in order to explore universal law of personality, the method should be valid, reliable, and replicable. Statistics were used as the major...
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Mastor, K.A. (2018). Nomothetic Study of Personality. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_477-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_477-1
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