ABSTRACT

Creativity is often thought of to be not as vital as other things. Creativity is thought to be merely for relief or an outlet to plug into when someone wants to be away from the world. Although this is not entirely bad, creativity should not be limited to this. Creativity can be associated with some major positive factors and can predict interesting things about a person. Creativity is positively correlated with happiness and seems to be linked to Locus of Control (LOC) (Pannells & Claxton, 2008). This study will examine correlations between creativity, LOC, and Explanatory Styles, using Rotters’ LOC scale, an Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), and Hocevar’s Creative Activities Inventory. The researcher has observed over their undergraduate years that assignments given to ministry majors and minors seem to allow for more creativity and freedom than assignments given to psychology majors and minors. The assignments for ministry students are more open-ended and less structured and the assignments for psychology students are more structured and seem to have a definitive answer associated with the questions. It is from these observations that the researcher desired to focus on these two samples for this study. Sixty-two undergraduate students participated in this study. A Pearson’s correlation was used for this study. The dependent variable was creativity and the two independent variables were LOC and Explanatory Style. It was expected that ministry majors would report having participated in more creative activities than psychology majors. It was also expected that psychology majors would have a more internal LOC than ministry majors. Results of the study suggest that there was no statistical significance found; therefore meaning the null hypothesis is accepted. However, statistical significance was found between LOC and Pessimistic Explanatory Style, r(60)= -0.72 P= .043.