Poster #72 - Children’s Creativity From a Social Network Perspective

• In Event: 2-002 - Special Poster Session 05 with Continental Breakfast Reception
  In Poster Session: PS 05 - Interdisciplinary Section

Integrative Statement

Creativity is both an individual ability and a social process (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003). Scholars have proposed placing the creative individual in a network of interpersonal relationships to understand the social side of creativity (Simonton, 1984), yet such research is still scant. The present study employed social network analysis to investigate the connection between children’s social network relationships and creativity, seeking to reveal the distribution and developmental patterns of creativity in children’s social networks. Informed by theoretical work (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003; Rawlings, Flynn, & Kendal, 2017), we not only tested the direct associations between social network variables and children's creativity, but also tested the moderation effects of grade as well as the mediation effects of children's social learning strategies.
The present study surveyed 1386 children from 27 classrooms in Grade 4, 5, 6 of 3 elementary schools. The questionnaire consisted of 4 parts – general information, social relationships, social learning strategies, and creativity. In the part of general information, we asked children’s gender, age, their position in classrooms, setting these as control variables in data analyses. In the part of social relationships, we asked children with whom they want to or not want to play in classrooms, combining these data from a whole classroom to calculate social network variables; we also asked children whom they thought have original ideas, thus calculating creativity perceived by classroom peers; we also asked children how many friends they had outside their classrooms, representing their social relationships outside classroom networks. In the part of social learning strategies, we asked children whether they chose to use social learning (i.e., to observe or to imitate) or asocial learning (i.e., to explore independently) to solve problems in contexts of life, learning, and play, setting these as mediating variables in data analyses. In the part of creativity, we used Williams’ Creativity Assessment Pocket and the Alternative Uses Test (i.e., to list uses of a paper cup) to evaluate children’s creativity.
The results showed that (1) children who could bridge different subgroups in their classrooms and who had more friends outside their classrooms tended to be more creative. (2) Although popular children were also perceived as more creative by their classroom peers, these children might not be more creative in reality. (3) As the grade increased, creative children were more popular among classroom peers, but their ability to bridge different subgroups decreased. (4) In classrooms with dense social relationships between members, classroom members tended to employ social learning to solve problems, thus their average level of creativity tended to be lower.
In conclusion, the present study not only showed that direct associations existed between children’s social relationships and creativity, but also found the dynamic connection between them as grade increased, as well as the mediating path of social learning strategies. Our future work seeks to increase the sample size and further analyze the data.

Authors

• Mingzhang Chen, Tsinghua University
  Presenting Author

• Zhen Wu, Tsinghua University
  Non-Presenting Author