Revisiting Creativity Research: An Investigation of Contemporary Approaches

In this study, contemporary creativity research was investigated by conducting an analysis of dissertation abstracts. Keywords relating to creativity were used to collect a sample from an online database. The abstracts were coded by discipline, research aspect (trait, process, or product), social level of analysis (individual, group, organization, or culture), and research approach (empirical vs. theoretical; quantitative vs. qualitative). Classification trees were built to explore the relationships between disciplines and their terminology, research aspect and social level of analysis. The results show that the terms creativity and innovation are used interchangeably by some disciplines, and diverse creativity research in terms of aspect and social level are produced within single disciplines. Besides indicating that disciplines overlap in their activity, these findings suggest new trends in research aspects and social levels. Notes Note. Checked cells indicate used search terms and their truncations, empty cells indicate their omission. 1The significance tests calculated for κ were one-tailed (α = 0.05; Ho: κ ≠ 0). Confidence limits for each dimension are the following: aspect = .76, level = .40, empirical versus theoretical = .56, quantitative versus qualitative = .43. Testing the reliability of a random subsample (n = 20) is, therefore, enough to detect κ as large as κ = .40. The largest confidence interval serves only as a guideline because there is no sample size estimation for κ with nondichotomous variables (Sim & Wright, Citation2005). However, n = 20 proves to be sufficient to detect any deviation from at least "moderate" reliability. The authors would like to thank Hans Hansen for his help on this issue.