Divergent thinking tasks offer multiple assessment options. Researchers usually evaluate both the quantity (fluency) and quality of the ideas/answers. The quality refers to their diversity (flexibility), originality (originality) and level of details (elaboration). However, since there is no consensus among researchers on which method of scoring these four dimensions of divergent thinking best assesses creative potential, we wanted to further explore this issue. We did this by comparing different ways of scoring originality, flexibility and fluency in their reliability and concurrent validity. The sample included 340 participants who solved the task of alternative use of common objects and the questionnaire assessing Big Five personality traits. The participants' responses to the divergent thinking task were scored for their originality, flexibility and fluency. The criterion of the reliability of the individual scoring method was the consistency of the assessments between the raters and the consistency of the assessments between prompts. The Big Five questionnaire served as a criterion for examining concurrent validity. In the research, we found that all methods of scoring different dimensions of creative potential, with the exception of one, correlate with each other significantly. Within each dimension of creative potential, i.e. originality scoring methods are also significantly correlated. In addition, we found that the two raters were moderately consistent with each other when judging originality and flexibility of the answers. A comparison of the consistency between subjects for different scoring methods showed that the number of original and useful answers individuals came up with varied between the prompts. The results of the correlations between Big Five and divergent thinking task showed that, among personality dimensions, only openness to experience and its subdimensions was significantly associated with all scoring methods, with the exception of one. The results of regression analysis showed that the scoring methods, especially the one for scoring the fluency dimension, are significant predictors of openness to experience. The study represents an important contribution to the research of divergent thinking, since, as far as we know, for the first time the validity of some scoring methods was assessed, certain measurement instruments that assess primary personality traits were used and the divergent thinking task used prompts that have not yet been used for certain scoring methods.
|