171 General Discussion 7 Nomothetic and idiographic research in practice A fully nomothetic research approach, like we applied in Chapters 2 and 3, is primarily useful for policymakers in practice. Substance use problems occur in the lives of many individuals with a mild intellectual disability (VanDerNagel et al., 2014), and there is a dearth of available effective interventions that target these problems and match the (dis)abilities that come with a mild intellectual disability (Kiewik et al., 2017). Our finding that Take it Personal! works better than treatment as usual, regardless of the severity of a behavioral problem domain, may suggest a broad implementation of the program to be a good idea. The crux for daily practice, however, is that applying treatments that are effective on average – like Take it Personal! – inevitably comes with the problem that most (if not all) individual clients to some extent deviate from that average. Professionals in practice intuitively know this, as they experience the heterogeneity of the target group and unique change processes on a daily basis. The consequence for Take it Personal! is that participants with a certain personality profile inevitably deviate from the average participant within that profile. For example, nobody who received personality profile negative thinking is the average negative thinker. This still leaves professionals (also the ones that use Take it Personal!) with the difficult task of identifying combinations of problem(s) and motives, and then deciding which to target for each individual. As such, we do need more than nomothetic results. Producing transportable knowledge that aids the professional in daily practice requires the nomothetic approach to be complemented by the idiographic approach (Hekler et al., 2018). In a way, each treatment trajectory is a case study performed by the clinician with the client. Idiographic science can truly enrich the series of case studies that constitute daily practice – enabling better understanding and care. Our case study (Chapter 6) revealed new patterns unbeknownst to her care professionals. For example, even though there were no long-term average reductions in challenging behaviors, it was new information for care professionals that the day after a therapy session was characterized by a reduced chance of challenging behavior. Practice craves idiographic input because they constantly deal with individual change processes. The methods we applied in Chapters 5 and 6 are but a drop in the ocean – there is lots more to be discovered at the individual level. After analyzing idiographically, there is still room to explore broader conclusions at the nomothetic level to better inform practitioners. I hope this dissertation underlines the crucial role of idiographic science and inspires future person-specific endeavors. Collecting intensive longitudinal data (e.g., EMA) and descriptively analyzing individual change trajectories
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