Abstract
The article presents the comparative results of research on 16-17 year-old Estonian adolescents’ and 9-12 year-old children’s creative thinking in connection with their social environment. Creative thinking has been defined through three components: fluency of thought, originality and flexibility of thinking. The aim of the empirical research on which this article is based was, firstly, to find out whether there is a connection between the child’s creative thinking and the parents’ profession, the family’s economic status and the child’s place of residence; and, secondly, to carry out a comparative analysis of two age groups, 9-12, and 16-17, regarding manifestations of creativity in connection with the factors described above. The results of the study demonstrate that the creative thinking of the 16-17 year-old adolescents is higher in the group where one or both parents have university education, work as top executives or specialists, where the families cope well economically and live in the capital. The creative thinking of the 9-12 year-old children is higher in the group where the mothers have a higher education and where they live in a rural area. Even though the correlation between social factors and the creative thinking of the adolescents treated in the study occurs only at the older age level, it is likely that the influence of cognitive and personality components of the child’s creativity begins at a much earlier age.