One of the not yet fully explored areas in creativity is the measurement of the cognitive component of creativity: divergent thinking (more precisely, the dimension of originality). The master's thesis deals with the comparison of the measurement characteristics (reliability and validity) of objective and subjective methods of evaluating answers in the Alternative Use Task. the originality of the answers was evaluated in four different ways, we used two subjective (averaging method, snapshot method) and two objective methods (threshold scoring method, complementary method). We were interested in the extent to which subjective and objective methods are reliable and what is the connection between the different methods. The reliability of the methods was evaluated by checking the consistency between the raters, as well as the consistency between the originality ratings for all three subjects at the AUT for each method. The two raters were moderately consistent in their assessment (ICC = 0.66 – 0.76). Alpha coefficients for the entire sample were as follows: complementary method (0.87), threshold method (0.76), snapshot method (0.74), and averaging method (0.37 – unacceptable, indicating low internal reliability). Then we evaluated the construct validity by calculating the correlation between originality ratings and creativity ratings of the same individuals in the conceptual expansion test (Animal from an alien planet). We also examined how ratings of originality relate to measures of openness (openness to experience and its facets). All correlations between the originality evaluation methods were statistically significant (with the exception of the correlation between the averaging method and aesthetic sensitivity), the correlations were low to moderate. We were also interested in the extent to which we can predict an individual's result when completing the BFI-2 questionnaire and creativity when testing the conceptual expansion of Animals from an alien planet with different aspects of divergent thinking: originality, fluency and flexibility. The results of the regressions revealed to us that originality, evaluated with a subjective or objective method, does not contribute significantly to the explained variance in any of the two dependent variables. Indeed, originality scores largely overlap with fluency scores. It turned out that the subjective methods are better compared to the objective ones because they do not correlate as highly with the fluency of the answers, but the difference between the methods was very small. Snapshot method proved to be optimal for use. The master's thesis contributes significantly to research in the field of originality and thus creativity, as in the literature we still encounter disagreements among psychologists regarding which methods for evaluating originality are most suitable for the task of alternative use and how to improve methods for evaluating originality.
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