Measuring flexibility: A text-mining approach

Abstract

In creativity research, ideational flexibility, the ability to generate ideas by shifting between concepts, has long been the focus of investigation. However, psychometric work to develop measurement procedures for flexibility has generally lagged behind other creativity-relevant constructs such as fluency and originality. Here, we build from extant research to theoretically posit, and then empirically validate, a text-mining based method for measuring flexibility in verbal divergent thinking (DT) responses. The empirical validation of this method is accomplished in two studies. In the first study, we use the verbal form of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) to demonstrate that our novel flexibility scoring method strongly and positively correlates with traditionally used TTCT flexibility scores. In the second study, we conduct a confirmatory factor analysis using the Alternate Uses Task to show reliability and construct validity of our text-mining based flexibility scoring. In addition, we also examine the relationship between personality facets and flexibility of ideas to provide criterion validity of our scoring methodology. Given the psychometric evidence presented here and the practicality of automated scores, we recommend adopting this new method which provides a less labor-intensive and less costly objective measurement of flexibility.

Give your ideas a hand: the role of iconic hand gestures in enhancing divergent creative thinking

“…That is, their creative products belonged to less diverse categories. Even though less studied than the other dimensions of divergent thinking, flexibility is an important aspect that ensures capturing participants who generate truly diverging ideas (Acar & Runco, 2019 ; Grajzel et al, 2023 ). An interpretation of why iconic gestures were negative predictors of flexibility could be that iconic gestures might keep participants stuck in the same category of ideas by overemphasizing the features of the objects that are being described.…”

Applying German word vectors to assess flexibility performance in the associative fluency task.

“…As discussed by Johnson et al (2021), a semantic model can be trained and used to calculate originality (or novelty, i.e., semantic distance between the target word and the response) as well as diversity (i.e., semantic distance between two responses) among all given answers in the AFT, composing a final flexibility value. Specifically, this could mean that instead of using semantic similarities as a measure of overall creativity (Beaty & Johnson, 2021), semantic similarities may also be used to evaluate the flexibility dimension of creativity (as recently demonstrated by Grajzel et al, 2022). As such, instead of counting the number of categories among responses, as originally proposed by Guilford (1968), or measuring the latencies between the responses given (Acar et al, 2019; Acar & Runco, 2017), semantic similarities may pose valid means for the objective evaluation of flexibility.…”

Automated feedback and creativity: On the role of metacognitive monitoring in divergent thinking.

“…We have decided to focus on originality given its singular position in the concept of creativity, as well as the accessibility of automated scoring systems. However, OCS has recently been developed to support flexibility analysis and could be used to provide feedback on this dimension in the future (Grajzel et al, 2023). One last limitation is the relative complexity of the intervention.…”