Abstract: Derived from a holisticinteractionistic system view, the personoriented approach, which diverges from the variableoriented approach, focuses on the individuals but not the variables and aims to identify the homogeneous subgroups. The holisticinteractionistic view comprises holism and interactionism. The former involves the assumptions on nonreducibility, nonseparability, and selforganization, whereas the latter refers to the reciprocal causal relationship between different components within and among systems. The typical statistical analytic techniques in the personoriented approach comprise clustering method, configural frequency analysis, ISOA, LICUR, latent class analysis, and mixture growth modeling, and so on. Although this approach initially emerged in the field of developmental psychology, these years it has increasingly gained popularity in several subdivisions of applied psychology, such as organizational behavior and community psychology. Future personoriented studies should standardize the usage of terminology, promote the prediction formation, and combine the personoriented with variableoriented approaches.

Key words: personoriented approach; holisticinteractionistic view; configural frequency analysis; ISOA; LICUR; ROPstat