Intelligence, Creative Thinking, and Sociometric Choice Among Fifth-Grade Children

Abstract

WITHIN THE PAST quarter century, a large num ber of sociometric studies have been conducted to analyze informal, interpersonal relations with for mal organizations. The technique of sociometry has proved itself quite useful in personnel selection and assignment, morale and productivity studies, cur riculum and instructional planning, and diagnosis of personal and interpersonal adjustment (16,11, 8). Comparisons between popular (or frequently selec ted) and unpopular (or seldom selected) groups of students in classrooms have not, however, yielded a sharp picture of personality characteristics which is associated with sociometric status of agroup member (4, 5, 13, 21, 26). Obviously, such status is a function of, among other factors, nature of the group and its goals, social and personal values and aspirations of a particular member under consider ation, maturity level of the choosers, criteria and form of questions used, and time when such meas urements are taken. It would, nevertheless, seem that possession of strong personal-social assets (interpersonal skills, pleasing and balanced personality, and abilities) and capacities for fulfillment of diversified needs in others tend to be associated with high choice values of an individual in a group (2, 3, 6). Both of these conditions could be cogently subsumed under the current concepts of a creative person w ho is de scribed as flexible, resourceful, imaginative, open, and integrative (10, 18, 14). If this is indeed the case, it may be hypothesized that creative thinking is positively associated with sociometric status. The present study was conducted to investigate this gen eral hypothesis. Although few studies can be found in literature with regard to the relationships between creative thinking and sociometric status, the workof Getzels and Jackson (7) and Torrance (20) suggest that (a) highly creative students tend to be ide nt if ied as most talkative and having naughty, silly, orwild ideas; (b) such characterization is more often as sociated with creative boys than girls; (c) ship nominations are given more or less independ ently of the level of creativity of the nominees; (d) social pressure tends to be applied to highly crea tive members against their contributions in a group performance situation; and (e) teachers know highly intelligent students better than highly creative (and also fairly high on intelligence) students and, more over, teachers prefer the highly intelligent group to average students, while not revealing such pref erence in relation to the highly creative group. In his study of 428 students in grades 7 through 12, Yam am oto (23) indicated that high, middle, and low creativity groups tended to receive peer nomi nations according to expectation (high > m i d d 1 e > low) in junior-high grades, but in senior grades, such was the case only among boys and not among girls. He also suggested that, in terms of the best friend criterion, (a) highly creative adolescents were more popular among girls than among boys, although they were no more popular among highly creative peers than among less creative ones, and (b) there was no tendency for highly creative adoles cents to give more nominations to members of the opposite sex when compared with their less creative peers. On the same body of high school students, Yama moto (24) reported correlation coefficients of. 15 to . 24 between various creativity subscores and corre sponding peer nomination scores. Sex differences were non-significant, but grade-to-grade variation was quite marked, the correlations being highest in the tenth grade and lowest in the eleventh grade.