»En målares gåta«:—en berättelse som utgångspunkt för att studera kreativitet hos 10-åringar

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Ten-year-olds' creativity and notions about imagination and reality were studied with qualitative and quantitative methods. The starting point was a creative task emanating from a story. 110 subjects (54 girls and 56 boys) fulfilled the task, which consisted of making a drawing. A number of children also took Guilford's Unusual Uses Test and a creativity questionnaire. 30 of the children (16 girls and 14 boys) were interviewed about their solution of the task. The drawings were categorized in two ways, owing to motif and creativity level. When it came to motif, two thirds of the subjects made concrete things and one third made imaginary phenomena. 26% were assessed to belong to a higher creativity level. With an alpha level of.05 the correlations between the three different creativity measures were significant. There was a significant sex difference concerning creativity level of the drawings. The interviews lead to 12 qualitative themes. For example one theme showed that some children believed in having a unique perceptual ability, which adults lack. Another theme was about the notion that there is something in between reality and imagination. A third theme presented logical and realistic statements about the task. The results were related to theories of Erikson, Piaget, Vygotskij and Winnicott.