The study of the creative personality has established itself as a major avenue of research on creativity and creative problem solving, other areas being creative process, product, and environment (or press). With respect to personality research, over the past 50-plus years, many studies have examined characteristics, attitudes, preferences, styles, and other personal qualities that appear to distinguish highly creative individuals. The purposes of this article are to review the accumulated body of creative personality research; describe the works of a few major researchers and their methods; briefly review theories that have been offered to explain why these personal qualities are causes, correlates, and/or outcomes of the creative process; and examine the relatively new construct of creative and problem-solving styles. Style assessment builds upon traditional personality research but holds substantial promise for talent identification and development for all individuals, not just those recognized as creatively gifted.
VIEW: An Assessment of Problem Solving Style (Selby, Treffinger, & Isaksen, 2002) is a new instrument for assessing problem‐solving style, for use with individuals from ages 12 through adult. It measures three dimensions of style relating to creative problem solving and change management. In this article, we discuss the construction of the instrument, the initial evidence supporting the instrument's reliability and validity, and a very brief overview of the instrument's foundations. Our reliability data involve both stability and internal consistency. We report evidence for the criterion‐related validity, based on correlational studies with relevant measures of learning style, cognitive style, and psychological type. We also conducted principal components factor analyses that support our three‐factor structure. Researchers and practitioners studying and applying Creative Problem Solving and change management methods can use VIEW in several ways. Finally, we identify several research directions that will contribute to the refinement and development of the instrument as well as to a better understanding of the “problem‐solving style” construct.
Sixty-two student teachers enrolled in an initial teacher education program in a medium-sized, metropolitan university completed the Kirton (1976) Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI), the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI;Briggs & Myers, 1976), and Khatena and Torrance's (1976) What-Kind-of-Person-Are-You checklist. Path analyses revealed a strong causal link between KAI innovator style and creative self-perceptions. Of the MBTI introversion, intuitive, thinking, and perceiver types, only intuitiveness exhibited a total causal link to creative self-perception that came close to the KAI. Creativity, personality, and cognitive style literatures are diverse and more research is suggested, although the KAI instrument appeared to be an effective predictor of scores on a creative self-perception measure.
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