Hong Kong Chinese People's View of Creativity

Abstract

This study was aimed at attaining some sense of implicit concepts of creativity among Hong Kong Chinese across different populations of participants and finding out how these implicit concepts compare to explicit concepts grounded in Western culture and tradition. Three stages of investigation are reported. In the first stage, 370 persons at railway and subway stations were asked to give their views on creativity and nominate Hong Kong person(s) outstanding for creativity, They were also asked to provide some demographic data and rate themselves on the creativity scale. In the second stage, 34 persons nominated in the first stage as outstanding for creativity were given the same task as the general public. In the third stage, local academics working in the area of creativity were asked to assign the categories of answers generated in the first and second stages of the study into one of the creativity strands: process, product, person or press. It was found that some core parts of the implicit concepts of creativity were overlapped highly across sex, age, education and occupational status variables. In other parts of the concept, how-ever, differences were found between males and females, teachers and laypersons, persons with tertiary education and other groups. Points of agreement between the implicit concepts of Hong Kong Chinese and explicit ones in the Western literature of creativity were these which linked creativity with something new, unique, leading to change and based on the independent thinking initiated by internal power and energy. However, originality, self expression as well as aesthetic and artistic elements were almost invisible in the Hong Kong implicit concepts of creativity.

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