Survey Results
Team members will write individual posts commenting on the results soon...
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Introducing...the Creativity Survey!
Survey Results
Team members will write individual posts commenting on the results soon...
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When we formulated these questions, we did so with the readings in Tucker and Katz regarding creativity and innovation. We looked at the basic definition of these concepts and constructed our questions to directly correlate with them so we could see just how creative people really are. Initially we thought of only including our classmates, however, we decided to open it up to facebook and see a sample of how everyone views themselves.
ReplyDeleteSome of the questions were designed to see opposing results. We began with asking how creative the person thought they were and the results were that most people considered themselves to mostly creative. We then asked how good they were at finding multiple unique solutions to a problem, which is definitely a form of creativity, and the results were on par. But what I found to be interesting was the almost even split in responses regarding how much direction and instruction that they prefer when given a task. The need for explicit instructions for an assignment vs being able to create whatever you want and the overwhelming creativity responses seem to contradict each other.
Personally, I was also interested in the left brain/right brain question. In the reading, they discuss that this categorization of a person being left or right brained is a way to stifle creativity. I had never thought of that before, and once I read that I concluded it is true. It is so easy to get off the hook or not even try to be creative if you are put into a category saying that you are equipped to. We also received feedback from some of the responders that did not like that question, which really surprised me. Apparently they were aware already of the ridiculousness of that stereotype. I thought that was pretty cool.
I really enjoyed this exercise. I loved reading the responses from all of the participants.
To me, the most interesting response of the survey was the proportion of people who answered that they thought more about how they would impact the future rather than about financial/immediate safety.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the former need is three levels higher than security and safety. If this survey were to be given again, I would be fascinated to know what the reasons people would have for their decision. Also, despite the fact that the survey sample is actually large enough to begin to do inference statistics on, I'm curious to know what the proprotion would be in different economic regions or among different groups of people
How did we get our survey out? We posted it on our Facebook profiles as well as a UWB CSS Facebook group. The collection method was definitely unscientific, but I think we still got some interesting info.
ReplyDeleteWe attempted to isolate the responses from CSS students, but the spreadsheet we used was kind of finicky and we didn't want to risk losing all of our other data.
Looking back, I think we could have phrased some of the questions better. Asking things like "When you think about the future, which do you think about more?" and only giving two options like "Safety and security (e.g. steady job, financial stability)" and "How you can impact the future" may very well have left some respondents asking "where's the 'both' option!?" Of course, the purpose of asking questions in such a style was deliberate: we wanted a person's answers to directly correspond to them being more creative or analytical. I always hated the nature vs. nurture discussions in psychology ("It's both dang it!"), so it's ironic that the survey we designed asked questions the way it did. It's no surprise that most of the questions which had only two answers to choose from tended to result in close to half-and-half distributions; respondents probably had a tough time picking one over the other.
I found the survey results to be pretty shocking. At least on a few of the questions. The biggest surprise to me was that almost exactly half of the respondents considered themselves left brained and the other considered themselves right brained. I would have thought that way more would be left brained compared to right brained. Another surprise was the 'flipping the classroom' question. Over half of the respondents rated it a 3 from 1 to 5. The way I read this is they do not like it because its awkward and something different but they do see some value in doing it.
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