A prototype strategy for the construction of a creativity scale

Abstract

Principles similar to the Act Frequency Approach (Buss and Craik, 1980) were applied to the construct of creativity. At first, a sample of 29 subjects generated acts, i.e. concrete behaviours‐in‐situations which due to their cognitive structure were indicative of creativity. As a second step, another group (N = 48) rated the prototypicality of the individual acts. A third sample of 102 subjects responded to the creativity acts in the sense of a self‐report. Peer ratings of creativity served as criterion measures. The scores of the relatively high‐prototypical creativity inventory correlated about 0.40 with the criteria, whereas the coefficients of the relatively low‐prototypical creativity inventory were approximately 0.20. With one exception, the validity of several other creativity tests was also very low, in keeping with the effect of their varying degree of prototypicality. In total, these results suggest that creativity can be assessed more successfully on the basis of questionnaires than with items of the common ability format, or with trait‐descriptive terms.