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Personal creative activity, male chronic illness and perceived stress : an exploratory study

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate whether personal creative activity predicted perceived stress in men living with a chronic physical illness. Personal creative activity was measured with the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (Carson, Peterson, & Higgins, 2005), select questions from the Flow Questionnaire (Collins, 2006), the Everyday Creativity Questionnaire (Ivcevic & Mayer, 2009) and the Creative Behaviour Inventory (Hocevar, 1979). Perceived stress was measured with the Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen, Kamarck, & Mermelstein, 1983). Sequential Multiple Regression was used to assess the relationship between personal creative activity and perceived stress levels of males with chronic illness. It was hypothesized that there would be a negative relationship between men‟s personal creative activity involvement and their perceived level of stress; that is, higher personal creative activity scores would be associated with lower perceived stress levels. This relationship was expected to be demonstrated by all men regardless of their diagnosis.<p>
Participants included 139 males with chronic illness (mean age: 50 years). Findings indicated that personal creative activity was not related to perceived stress. However the participants reported being involved in many different personal creative activities not included in the four creative measures, which may help explain the low scores on the creativity measures that may have skewed the data and resulted in low correlations. Age and number of symptoms were related to perceived stress. As the participants aged, their perceived stress decreased; and the more symptoms they reported, the higher their perceived stress. The strengths and limitations of the current study are outlined, along with implications for future research and practice. Future research is needed to further examine the relationship between creativity and perceived stress in men with chronic illness as well as to develop creativity measures that include more male-oriented activities.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:SSU.etd-09132010-124024
Date15 September 2010
CreatorsLabuik, Tara Jean
ContributorsHellsten, Laurie-Ann M., Wilson, Jay, Nicol, Jennifer A. J., Kowalski, Kent, Kinzel, Audrey
PublisherUniversity of Saskatchewan
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://library.usask.ca/theses/available/etd-09132010-124024/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Saskatchewan or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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