Barriers to personal creativity in Spanish and Portuguese university students

Abstract

In the 21st century, the university should be an explicit space for developing students’ creative skills. The literature on creativity in Higher Education is scarce, particularly on the students’ perceptions. Thus, this study aims to analyze barriers perceived by Spanish university students compared to Portuguese students to better understand the obstacles found at this educational level. For this purpose, the Inventory of Barriers to Personal Creativity was adapted to Spanish university students. The adaptation process from the Portuguese to the Spanish version followed a forward-backward procedure, and cross-validation analysis was used to study the factor structure. The four-factor structure was maintained, but only 36 of the 44 items were retained in the Spanish version. All factors showed good or very good reliability and explained an important amount of the variance. Some cultural differences between the Portuguese and Spanish versions appeared because Spanish university students perceived fewer barriers to develop creativity. In both cultures, gender and curricular areas’ differences were found, but with some specificities. The study concluded that the instrument has an adequate structure and refers to a specific construct maintained in different cultures. Also, both versions could be applied for further broader and more representative cross-cultural studies, contributing to developing new studies on creativity in Higher Education.