Condensing the Muses: Development of the Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS) Short Form

Creative self-perceptions reflect a unique blend of motivational, metacognitive, and personal characteristics, both shaping and being shaped by people’s creative experiences. The Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS) is a domain-specific measure that captures people’s self-oriented views across five creativity domains: Everyday, Scholarly, Performance, Scientific, and Artistic. The scale’s complex, multidimensional structure comes with considerable length, limiting its broader use. In the present research, we aimed to develop a concise version of K-DOCS while preserving its domain specificity. Across four samples from the U.S. and Poland, we identified a subset of items for the short-form K-DOCS using a metaheuristic algorithm (Ant Colony Optimization; Study 1, N = 825) and then examined the factor structure of the resulting 20-item version (Studies 2, 3 and 4, overall N = 1160). The proposed short form retains the original scale’s five-domain structure, demonstrates strong model fit and subscale reliability, provides a gender-fair assessment of creative self-perceptions, and shows substantial associations with relevant personality traits and creative achievements. This 20-item version can serve as a vital alternative to the original 50-item scale, offering an efficient and psychometrically sound measure for both research and applied contexts where a short yet comprehensive assessment of creative self-perceptions is needed.