MEASURING FLEXIBILITY: A TEXT-MINING APPROACH

In creativity research, ideation flexibility, the ability to generate ideas by utilizing differing semantic categories, has long been the focus of investigation. Psychometric work to develop measurement procedures for flexibility has generally lagged behind fluency and originality. Here, we build from extant research on the measurement of originality using text-mining models 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 used 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 show that our text-mining based flexibility scoring method can achieve a high level of reliability and internal validity with Alternate Uses Task. In addition, flexibility scores correlated with theoretically relevant outside attributes including artistic expertise and Big 5 personality facets in the second study indicating criterion validity. To assist researchers in applying this flexibility scoring method and provide specific details about how to undertake an analysis of flexibility using text-mining models.