30 Chapter 1 Outline of the dissertation Chapter 1: General Introduction Chapter 2: The effectiveness of an indicated prevention programme for substance use in individuals with mild intellectual disabilities and borderline intellectual functioning: Results of a quasi-experimental study Chapter 3: Exploring the role of emotional and behavioral problems in a personality-targeted prevention program for substance use in adolescents and young adults with intellectual disability Chapter 4: The feasibility of daily monitoring in adolescents and young adults with mild intellectual disability or borderline intellectual functioning Chapter 5: Idiographic personality networks: Stability, variability and when they become problematic Chapter 6: A complex systems perspective on chronic aggression and self-injury: Case study of a woman with mild intellectual disability and borderline personality disorder Chapter 7: General Discussion My own change towards this PhD The chapters you are about to read also testify how my own perspective on how to study change, changed. Between 2015 and 2019 I studied at Radboud University, first a two-year Pre-Master’s program Educational Sciences and then the two-year Research Master’s program in Behavioural Science. What I learned in the curriculum was almost exclusively nomothetic. The scientific literature, the methods that were taught, and the required analyses were all nomothetic. Of course, nobody explicitly called these methods nomothetic. I realize now that the distinctions between nomothetic and idiographic principles play little to no part in the everyday lives of most social scientists because doing nomothetic research is so self-evident to the majority of scientists that it does not even need this label. Generally speaking, most scholars share the opinion that good science requires large sample sizes, assessed with standardized surveys that have proper psychometric qualities. Case study research was barely mentioned in my studies, and if at all, was deemed the lowest form of scientific evidence because generalization is not possible. I suppose that case study research was lacking in the curriculum because one cannot generalize from a case study to the population. This may be true, but is that a reason to only consider nomothetic designs? I think not. This general introduction thus can leave no doubt as to one thing: people (with a mild intellectual disability) differ from each other and change over time. I do not mean to insinuate that the existence of within- and
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