ime perspective was retrospective. There were no independent or dependent variables because it is impossible to manipulate either creative achievement or psychopathology to establish a causal relationship. The study was therefore correlational. This does not affect the study in any way except that we cannot establish a cause effect relationship between mental illness and creativity. There doesnt appear to be any ethical problems.Since this study includes a detailed description of its sample and design, we can easily evaluate its limitations. It is limited by the way information on the subjects was gathered and may possibly be limited in the way it was evaluated. Because it was gathered by published biographical data, reliability is limited. There was no random assignment. The subjects must have been well know in some way to have their biographical information published and available to the public. Most people are not famous; therefore, it is difficult to generalize the results to the population as a whole. Reliability and validity may have also been affected by the method of data evaluation. More than one researcher evaluated the biographies for the evidence of mental illness because the sample size was so large. Individual error or bias may have been a problem, but Ludwig proved that it was not by testing for inter-rater reliability. Four raters evaluated six biographies and their results were compared to determine their level of agreement. The mean percentage of agreement was 85.9, indicating high inter-rater reliability. It is high enough to determine that reliability and validity were not significantly affected by the method of the study.After critiquing both articles, their strengths and weaknesses are apparent. The popular article seems to be much weaker. It does not include a lot of information it needs to establish credibility. It basically presented a lot of statistics with very little explanation. It is up ...
