The Cross-Cultural Invariance of Creative Cognition: A Case Study of Creative Writing in U.S. and Russian College Students.

Unlike intelligence, creativity has rarely been investigated from the standpoint of cross-cultural invariance of the structure of the instruments used to measure it. In the study reported in this article, we investigated the cross-cultural invariance of expert ratings of creative stories written by undergraduate students from the Russian Federation and the United States. Analyses of differential rater and item functioning using Many-Facet Rasch Measurement and multiple levels of invariance using confirmatory factor analyses suggested partial measurement invariance of creative ability estimates obtained using this method in two cultures. Russian and U.S. students demonstrated similar overall levels of creativity; however, U.S. students received higher emotionality ratings than Russian students did. The findings are discussed in the context of viewing creativity as at least a partially culturally invariant trait whose manifestation is moderated by culture-specific semantic knowledge and patterns of linguistic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]