창의적 소비효능감 척도 개발과 타당화

Recently in Korea creativity has often been mentioned as a driving force of economic growth and as a result interest in creativity has been very high. However, there is not much research on consumer creativity, even though there are many successful cases where creative consumptions introduced by consumers have induced new product developments and increases in product sales. The current study aims to initiate a research program on consumer creativity by introducing the concept ‘creative consumer efficacy’ and to develop a scale to measure the concept and to validate the scale. We focus on this concept because belief in one’s ability to create something new and useful is one of the main motivational drivers of individual creativity.
First, we define ‘creative consumer efficacy’ as ‘confidence in one’s ability to solve consumption related problems in an original and functional way, different from existing consumption usages or methods.’ Then, we made 30 preliminary test items by consulting on the theoretical review of creative consumption and the literature on self-efficacy. Creative consumption was reviewed in terms of four aspects, product, process, person and environment, and our test items were phrased as asking self-efficacy questions regarding the four aspects of creativity.
The data were collected by online survey and 1091 adults aged from twenties to fifties participated, but the responses from 799 participants who completely answered the survey were used for data analysis. The data were randomly divided into two sets and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out for each set. Based on the results of the factor analyses, 19 test items with a four factor solution were selected. The four factors are original thinking efficacy, usage expansion efficacy, problem solving efficacy, and method variation efficacy. To test the construct validity of the newly developed scale, we also measured related constructs such as general self-efficacy, creative self-efficacy, consumer innovativeness, creative personality, and associative thinking. The first four constructs were expected to be positively correlated with the creative consumer efficacy and its four factors and the results turned out as expected. As for associative thinking measured by Remote Associates Test(RAT) was expected to be unrelated to the creative consumer efficacy because the scale mostly measures divergent thinking of creativity, while RAT mostly measures convergent thinking of creativity. The results turned out as predicted as well. In addition to the correlational analyses, we divided the participants into two groups, innovators and adaptors, based on the score of consumer innovativeness measured by the Kirton Adaptation-Innovation Inventory and compared the averages of the creative consumer efficacy scale of the two groups. The two groups showed significant differences in the whole scale and the four factors. All these results validate the construct validity of the scale.
With this new scale, further studies can be followed. First, we need to validate the scale with additional studies and to find out precedent factors affecting the creative consumer efficacy and subsequent effects resulting from it. In the current study, we focused on the original and functional aspects of creativity, but we can broaden the scope of creativity including aesthetic aspect of creativity as well. In the future, we hope our study to be a catalyst activating research on consumer creativity.