Taking Inventory of the Creative Behavior Inventory: An Item Response Theory Analysis of the CBI

Abstract

The original 90-item Creative Behavior Inventory (CBI) was a landmark self-report scale in creativity research, and the 28-item brief form developed nearly 20 years ago is a popular measure of everyday creativity. Relatively little is known, however, about the psychometric properties of this widely used scale. In the current research, we conduct a detailed psychometric investigation into the 28-item CBI by applying methods from item response theory using a sample of 2,082 adults. Our investigation revealed several strengths of the current scale: excellent reliability, suitable dimensionality, appropriate item difficulty, and reasonably good item discrimination. Several areas for improvement were highlighted as well: (1) the four-point response scale should probably have fewer options; (2) a handful of items showed gender-based differential item functioning, indicating some item bias; and (3) local dependence statistics revealed clusters of items that are probably redundant. These analyses support the continued use of the CBI for assessing engagement in everyday creative behaviors and suggest that the CBI could benefit from thoughtful revision.