사회 전반에 거쳐 창의성에 대한 관심이 높아졌지만 소비와 관련된 창의성 연구는 매우 부족한 상황이다. 또한 기존 연구도 제약이 있는 환경에서 상황적으로 유발된 일시적인 창의적 소비에 대한 연구가 대부분이다. 본 연구에서는 보다 지속적으로 나타나는 창의적 소비에 대해 연구하기 위해 개인 창의성 모델의 주된 동기요인인 자기효능감에 대한 믿음에 주목하여 ‘창의적 소비효능감’ 개념을 제안하고 이 개념을 측정할 수 있는 척도 개발과 이에 대한 타당화 작업을 시도하였다. 기존 창의적 소비에 대한 이론적 개관 연구에 기초하여 창의적 산출물, 사고과정, 사람, 환경 측면에 자기효능감 개념을 접목하여 30개의 예비문항을 개발하고, 20~50대 성인들을 대상으로 온라인 조사를 실시하여 자료를 수집하였다. 탐색적, 확인적 요인분석 결과 19개 문항과 4개의 하위요인(독창적 사고 효능감, 용도확장 효능감, 문제해결 효능감, 방식다양화 효능감)으로 구성된 창의적 소비효능감 척도를 개발하였다. 본 척도의 타당화 작업을 위해 관련 척도(일반적 자기효능감, 창의적 자기효능감, 소비자혁신성향, 창의적 성격, 단어연상과제)와의 관계를 살펴보았고, 그 결과 본 척도의 수렴타당도와 변별타당도를 확보하였다. 본 척도의 추가적인 타당도 확보를 위해 필요한 추후 연구와 본 연구가 기여하는 바에 대해 논의하였다.

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.