Disadvantages of holistic approach

Holism - Strengths and Weaknesses

Advantages

• Often, there are aspects of social behaviour that only emerge within a group context and cannot be understood at the level of the individual group members. E.g. effects of conformity in Stanford Prison experiment - the interaction between people and behaviour and group is important, not studying participants as individuals.

Disadvantages

• Holistic explanations tend not to lend themselves to rigorous scientific testing and can become vague and speculative as they become more complex. Higher level explanations that combine many different perspectives present researchers with a practical dilemma - if we accept that there are many factors that contribute to depression for example, it becomes difficult to establish which is most influential and which one to use, for example as a basis for therapy.

Evaluation