PSYC 3550 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Face Validity, Operational Definition, Predictive Validity
26 Sep 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
How do we Measure Creativity?
Creativity Exercise: There Is a Man and a Dog
• There’s a boy with his dog, walking along the pier by the beach. The dog
is walking on his hind legs, and holding the boy’s hand. The boy and the
dog are talking about how funny it is that everyone is looking at them as
if their companionship is odd. Little do they know, someday humans and
dogs will be walking and talking together as a normality. Charlie and his
dog, Loki, are from the future, and they arrived here through a portal
found at the centre eye of the ferris-wheel at the amusement park on
that same pier that they are walking along. They came back to the past
to try to save Loki’ soul mate from being put up for adoption by an
owner who no longer wanted her.
• Since there is no agreed definition of what creativity is, it is difficult to
agree upon a best measure that remains reliable across different
operational definitions of creativity
Creativity Tests
• Self-report inventories
o Creative Personality Scale (30 adjectives)
▪ 18 adjectives indicate creative personality
▪ 12 adjectives indicate a non-creative personality
▪ Low face validity- the adjectives don’t necessarily
constitute a “creative personality”
▪ Low Reliability- positive items have good reliability while
then negative items did not
▪ Meaning of the terms is not clear (broad)
2
▪ There is no distinction between not endorsing an item and
simply refusing to respond
o Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ)
▪ Used to use individuals who were deemed prestigious
(non-generalizable, little data)
▪ Confused creative achievement with attitudes towards
creativity or personality variables (like the CPS)
▪ Disadvantages
• Right skewed because most people score low, since
the terms are very specific (analysis cannot assume
normality)
• Sampled from Harvard students, so it’s not
representative of the population
• Vulnerable to subjective interpretation
▪ Advantages- excellent reliability and validity
• Quick and inexpensive
• Open to different types of creativity
• Alpha coefficient: 0.96- the items are strongly
correlated to one another
• Predictive validity- scale predicts future outcomes
(collage ratings)
• Convergent validity- correlated well with related
creativity constructs
• Discriminant validity- not correlated with all
constructs
• Higher face validity- terms measure creativity
