Are Boys More Verbally Creative?

Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 639 Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Conference of Psychology, Health, and Social Science (ICPHS 2021) Are Boys More Verbally Creative? Gender-Based Difference in Verbal Creativity in Adolescents Susi Susanti1,*, Zulmi Ramdani2 1 Department of Psychology, Medical Faculty, Hasanuddin University, Indonesia Faculty of Psychology, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati, Indonesia * Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] 2 ABSTRACT As one of the important competencies in the 21st century, creativity becomes an asset for a teenager to grow and compete to become a superior generation. Gender differences are often seen as an important indicator in determining what interventions are appropriate to improve these competencies. This study aims to see whether there are differences in verbal creativity between boys and girls in a group of teenagers who are the subjects of this study. A total of 172 teenagers filled out a verbal creativity test (TKV) which consisted of 6 subtests and measured aspects of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of a person. A two-way analysis of variance was carried out to answer the research objectives. The results showed that men obtained better test results than women from the average score obtained in filling out the test. Meanwhile, the results of the two-way analysis showed that there were significant differences between men and women in the acquisition of verbal creativity in this study. Suggestions and limitations of the research will be presented further in this paper. Keywords: Adolescents, creative verbal test, gender differences, creativity. 1. INTRODUCTION The development of technology and science today has brought individuals into other conditions such as being more attractive, active, innovative, and competitive. They must acquire many important competencies to compete and get better welfare [1]. This includes 21st-century competencies that many experts describe as unimportant for survival. These competencies include critical thinking, creative thinking, communicative and collaborative [2, 3, 4]. To get the competencies that are expected to develop in the 21st century, it is not easy for someone to have them. Continuous planning, training, and stimulation are required until the individual masters these competencies [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. This situation is critical to develop, especially if it is trained from an early age until the individual is at the stage of adolescent development. At the time of adolescence, these competencies will be used for them to prepare themselves before entering the adult world. One of the competencies that will be tested in this study is youth creativity. Creativity in adolescents is considered an absolute thing that they must develop along with other abilities so that they are ready and can enter adulthood better. Creativity refers to something very abstract because it involves many dimensions and situations, including verbal creativity, which is important for someone to appear confident and get a place in various positive opportunities [10, 11, 12]. Verbal creativity is still rarely explored by many teenagers and parents. Most parents train their children to be smart in certain cognitive abilities and talents. At the same time, verbal creativity is an important thing that can be used as an initial weapon to gain knowledge and other skills. Some experts then agree that this verbal creativity shows how a person can develop writing skills, speech skills, negotiation skills, the ability to create a various atmosphere, language skills, the ability to influence others to determine whether he is worthy of a job or not. [13, 14, 15]. From these facts, we can conclude that verbal creativity is important and absolutely must be developed in adolescents. Another fact that became the attention of researchers in this study, some experts found that verbal creativity would be highly dependent on gender in the process [16, 17]. Men tend to get more Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 7 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 639 opportunities to speak up than women. Women are more likely to keep their emotions inside and rarely express them to the public. These results are also reinforced by some classic facts which also show that the space and opportunities given to men are more than women so that some activities that use verbal skills are still very much dominated by men, including writers, lawyers, politicians, board members and other jobs that require verbal skills. The conditions described earlier provide quite real information and raise another question: can men be said to be more verbally creative than women? This question is what the researcher wants to answer in this paper related to this phenomenon. 2. METHOD This study uses a quantitative approach with a comparative model, where the researcher aims to see whether there are significant differences between the two groups tested or not [18,19]. This model was chosen because the researcher wanted to see if there were substantial differences between men and women in the aspect of their verbal creativity. In addition, the follow-up test was chosen to see which one was better in obtaining verbal creativity tests in this study. The subjects in this study were teenagers in Yogyakarta who were selected using purposive sampling. This retrieval technique is used to get subjects with characteristics determined by the researchers, high school teenagers willing to participate in this study. The measuring for Verbal Creativity used in this study refers to the Verbal Creativity Test (TKV) developed [20]. The test consists of six subtests that measure adolescents' ability in verbal creativity. The test measures aspects of fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. He continued that the validity of the items used to meet a good standard. For example, in the first subtest, respondents were asked to write down a word determined by the initial letter so that they only had to develop it according to the instructions. Data collection is done by giving a set of tests to the respondent in question using the existing standardization. The data was then processed to descriptively and differentiate between men and women capabilities. Interpretation is given according to the objectives needed in the research. 3. RESULT AND DISCUSSION The data collection results conducted by researchers obtained the number of respondents as many as 172 teenagers. For the male gender, there were 71 adolescents (41%), and for females, as many as 101 adolescents (59%). Thus, this study is more dominated by female respondents. The first analysis results were carried out by identifying the normality of the data used. Tests using Shapiro-Wilk turned out to show that the data were normally distributed with a significance value of .295 (p > .05). Then the researcher conducted further analysis to find out the difference between the two groups, which shows the F value was 4.150 and the pvalue was .043 (p < .05). The discriminatory test results show that there are significant differences between men and women in the acquisition of their verbal creativity test. Meanwhile, when viewed from the average results per group, the average score for the male group was 118.2 points while the female group was 113.6 points. The average result shows that men score higher than women so that it can be said in this study that men are better than women. Several studies later confirmed why men could be better at obtaining their verbal tests because this situation was related to habits and routine factors [1617]). It is also associated with cultural factors. The tendency of society to limit women's activities in conveying suggestions and ideas for making choices sometimes makes them confined at home. Meanwhile, boys are freer to express and say things verbally in the environment [16-17]. Another study described in another context then provides information that parents tend to give their sons more freedom to decide what they want to choose. This also has an impact on the training process and opportunities for boys. Even in certain cultures, some make girls repressive, that is, they must obey men, so there are many interventions from an early age that are then disproportionate to girls [21-22]. The results of this study simply provide information that boys get a higher score than girls. This means that the space and opportunities that must be given between men and women should be balanced so that there is no difference between the two scores. The limitation of this study is that it does not identify other psychological factors that affect gender differences in the group, so future research should pay more attention to this. 8 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 639 4. CONCLUSION This study concluded that there were significant differences between men and women in the scores on the verbal creativity test being tested. Boys get better grades than girls. These results indicate a need for more intense stimulation for teenage girls so that they are ready to do any activities that require verbal skills. AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS All authors contributed significantly to this research. Susi Susanti acts as a drafter, data retrieval, and data analyzer, data reviewer and scriptwriter. 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