Measuring Divergent Thinking in Youth and the impact of culture

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heinz Holling
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246486438

The focus of the work is fundamental research on theoretically appropriate psychometric models of divergent thinking tests, the development of new objective scoring indices and comparison of these indices with subjective scoring of originality. A secondary focus is the relations of divergent thinking to cultural variables. Divergent thinking (DT) is a crucial component of creative thinking and potential. Thus, the measurement of DT one of the core issues of assessment of creative potential. Typically, DT tests can be scored in three different ways, resulting in fluency, flexibility or originality scores. Fluency is simply the counted number of ideas a person generated during task fulfillment, flexibility is the number of different categories, whereas originality refers to the uniqueness in an inventive sense. For all of these indices for DT test performance, several research questions will be examined. With respect to fluency scores, a psychometric model will be applied that takes into account that fluency scores are naturally count data: the Rasch-Poisson counts model (RPCM). Moreover this model has all the favorable properties of the logistic Rasch model. This model has not yet been applied to fluency scores from DT tests and methodological issues regarding this model will be examined as well. The RPCM will be applicable to flexibility scores as well. Furthermore, with respect to flexibility we will examine if it matters how the category system for assigning the ideas is derived. Typically, such category systems are derived by trained raters and then ideas are assigned according to it. Another possibility is to ask participants to build up their own categories, an approach that has never yet been compared to expert derived categories. In addition, we will examine issues regarding originality. Originality scores suffer from the following methodological problems: 1) confounding of fluency and originality; 2) ambiguity of statistical rarity; and 3) dependence on sample size. None of the proposed objective indices take all of these problems into account. Moreover, problems occurring with subjective originality scoring, such as confounding of the ratings due to, for example, personality variables of the raters, will be examined too, whereby a comparison of different subjective and objective scoring methods will be included. For all three different DT scores (fluency, flexibility and originality) we will examine their relationships with cultural variables, in particular exposure to multiple cultures, which is a dimension that is expected to be positively related to performance in DT tests. To summarize, various assessment issues will be examined with the additional focus on multiculturalism. The complementary skills of the French and German teams are crucial for the success of the project. Planned tasks for each year of the project are described.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Todd Lubart