Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods.

TLDR

Divergent thinking is central to creativity research, yet traditional scoring systems that assign points for infrequent responses and sum them suffer from well‑known limitations. The article proposes a new divergent‑thinking scoring approach and evaluates its reliability and validity after reviewing prior methods. The Top 2 method asks participants to select their two most creative responses from a divergent‑thinking task, which raters then score on a 5‑point scale, and a latent‑variable study linked the scores to Big Five personality traits. Reliability analysis showed that subjective ratings of unusual‑uses and instances tasks are dependable with only 2–3 raters, and over half of divergent‑thinking variance is explained by personality dimensions, with the article providing instructions for the new method.

Abstract

Divergent thinking is central to the study of individual differences in creativity, but the traditional scoring systems (assigning points for infrequent responses and summing the points) face well-known problems. After critically reviewing past scoring methods, this article describes a new approach to assessing divergent thinking and appraises its reliability and validity. In our new Top 2 scoring method, participants complete a divergent thinking task and then circle the two responses that they think are their most creative responses. Raters then evaluate the responses on a 5-point scale. Regarding reliability, a generalizability analysis showed that subjective ratings of unusual-uses tasks and instances tasks yield dependable scores with only 2 or 3 raters. Regarding validity, a latent-variable study (n = 226) predicted divergent thinking from the Big Five factors and their higher-order traits (Plasticity and Stability). Over half of the variance in divergent thinking could be explained by dimensions of personality. The article presents instructions for measuring divergent thinking with the new method.