Comparisons of the Creative Class and Regional Creativity with Perceptions of Community Support and Community Barriers

Mark A. Runco
University of Georgia, Athens

Selcuk Acar
Buffalo State, The State University of New York

W. Keith Campbell, Garrett Jaeger, Jessica McCain, & Brittany Gentile
University of Georgia, Athens

Runco, M. A., Acar, S., Campbell, W. K., Jaeger, G., McCain, J., & Gentile, B. (2016). Comparisons of the creative class and regional creativity with perceptions of community support and community barriers. Business Creativity and the Creative Economy, 2(1), 83-92. https://doi.org/10.18536/bcce.2016.10.2.1.08

Abstract

The theory of the creative class has proven to be useful but may be slanted towards professional levels of creativity. Additionally, differences between (a) objective measures of regional creativity, including the Creativity Index used by Florida (2012) and (b) creativity as measured by more traditional psychological assessments (that are commonly used in the creativity research) have not been explored. The research reported here does exactly that. It presents analyses of data from a battery of traditional creativity tests that had been administered to 3000 individuals from across the United States. Testing was completed via Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Data on population density and regional information were also collected. Results indicated that perceptions of community support for creativity were related to but far from redundant with the Florida Creativity Index used in previous research on the creative class. A secondary but important findings was that an analysis using one of the traditional measures of creativity indicated that respondents were significantly more creative outside of school than they were when they were in school. There were domain differences in this regard. Implications, limitations, and future research are detailed at the end of the article.