Schizophrenia, personal constructs, and Riedel's constructs.

W. W. Riedel's 1970 report of an investigation of personal constructs, using schizophrenics as Ss, encourages criticism of two major aspects of such endeavors. Unwarranted application of the disease model as a paradigm for studying undesirable conduct produces a series of strategy errors: weak explication of linkages between theory and measurements, noninclusion of relevant demographic data, uncritical acceptance of admission diagnosis as definition of the independent variable psychos-is, omitting statistics which could reveal extensive overlap of samples, overlooking the effects of disguised variables (e.g., "hospitalization"), and implicit use of formistic metaphysical assumptions. In addition, Riedel's use of personal construct theory draws criticism for the logical inadequacies shown as he tries to use a standard personality theory to isolate the correlates of psychosis.