A creative personality scale for the Adjective Check List.

Abstract

The Adjective Check List was administered to seven male and five female samples comprising 1,701 subjects. Direct or inferred ratings of creativity were available for all individuals. The samples covered a wide range of ages and kinds of work; criteria of creativity were also varied, including ratings by expert judges, faculty members, personality assessment staff observers, and life history interviewers. The creativity scales of Domino and Schaefer were scored on all protocols, as were Welsh's A-l, A-2, A-3, and A-4 scales for different combinations of origence and intellectence. From item analyses a new 30-item Creative Personality Scale was developed. It is positively and significantly (p < .01) related to all six of the prior measures but surpasses them in its correlations with the criterion evaluations. Creativity is a valued commodity in every kind of human endeavor. Since the publication of Guilford's (1950) influential presidential address to the American Psychological Association, an enormous amount of effort has been invested in the study of creativity and its determinants. One line of investigation within the larger domain of inquiry has been the search for methods of assessment that can identify creative talent and potential within the individual. Many of these studies have addressed cognitive issues and problem solving. For example, Guilford and his colleagues (Guilford, Wilson, Christensen, & Lewis, 1951) developed a series of tests stressing ingenuity, the ability to overcome constraining sets, and fluency in ideation. Mednick (1962) proposed a method of assessment requiring the generation of remote associations for the solution of analogies. In regard to intellectual functioning, it should be noted that most studies have found intellectual ability as usually measured to be unrelated to criteria of originality. MacKinnon and Hall (1972) obtained Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WA'IS; Wechsler, 1958)