The Consensual Assessment Technique for Product Creativity (CAT) (Amabile, 1982, 1983a; Hennessey & Amabile, 1999) is based on the assumption that a panel of independent judges, persons with expertise in a particular field who have not had the opportunity to confer with one another or the researcher and who have never been trained as to how to make their ratings, are best able to make judgments of product creativity and related dimensions. Over 25 years of research carried out in the West have clearly established that the creativity of products can, in fact, be reliably and validly assessed based upon the consensus of experts. The purpose of the present paper is to explore the applicability of the CAT in investigations involving products and raters in non-Western societies. Elementary school teacher-judges were recruited in the US, Saudi Arabia, China and South Korea and were asked to make assessments of collages and stories created by children living in their local area. Across all four cultural contexts, judges’ ratings of product creativity were found to be highly reliable. The argument is made that because investigative paradigms employing the CAT focus on the production of real-world, tangible products that are rated by persons who share the cultural background of the individuals doing the creating, a multiplicity of practical and theoretical problems and biases typically associated with cross-national investigations are avoided. Resear-chers are encouraged to explore the utility of the CAT for multicultural investigations.
METHOD
RESULTS
DISCUSSION
REFERENCES