Creativity and anxiety in the late middle childhood

Abstract

This research project is part of a sub-division of an inter-university research project regarding resilience in children in the South African context and concepts related to it. The title of the project is: Resilience in children in the South African context. This study focused on the nature of creativity as well as the nature of anxiety in late middle childhood. The study also attempted to determine if there is a relationship between creativity and anxiety in the late middle childhood. Regions and schools were identified to make the project as broad as possible. Urban and rural areas, as well as different race groups, languages and socioeconomic groups were used in this study. The children completed the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking as well as the Piers-Harris Children's Self Concept Scale. The parents completed the Child Symptom Inventory - 4. The processing of the data was done by the Statistical Consultation Service of the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking was scored by the researcher and other project members. The Cronbach Alpha Coefficient was used to determine the reliability of the measuring instruments and factor analysis was used to determine the validity of the measuring instruments. To determine the nature of creativity and anxiety in children, averages, standard deviations, variance of coefficient, skewness and kurtosis was used. Lastly, in order to determine the relationship between creativity and anxiety, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Cohen's Effect Size were used to measure statistical significance and practical significance. The results showed that the measuring instruments do have good reliability. However, some of the instruments showed better results than others with regards to validity. A possible reason was that some of the measuring instruments may not be appropriate for test circumstances in South Africa. Poor creativity results were obtained by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. It seemed as if the

children were able to provide responses, but the quality of the responses was not creative, but rather ordinary. The anxiety scores showed that the child does not experience anxiety to the full, but rather only symptoms of anxiety are experienced. The probable reasons were that the children's problems do not seem to occur in excess, but are rather situation-bound and that the child may be able to adapt to the high risk situation. The relationship between creativity and anxiety showed that, if anxiety should increase, creativity will decrease. A problem experienced in the research was that when the group was compared to other groups in other circumstances, the research group performed poorer. The developing of South African norms could possibly solve this problem. Race differences may also have played a role in the results. This could probably be prevented by the translation of the measuring instruments into African languages. From this study it appears that creativity may be lacking in South African children in the late middle childhood. The development of programmes might be useful in order to improve creativity in the late middle childhood. The programmes could also deal with identifying and coping with anxiety.