**3. Method**

#### **3.1 Participants**

Five provincial-level kindergartens in Zhuhai city of Guangdong province, China, participated in this study, with a total sample of 127 children. Ethical consent was obtained from both parents and teachers, as the children were very young. Each child participated in a 30-minute Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement (TCAM) [23] test to assess creativity. Their mothers filled out the Chinese Big Five Personality Inventory (CBF-PI) and Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ ), with a total of 70 items. Excluding 98 (77%) children participated and 88 (70%) records were valid. The mean and SD of children's age were 5.50 and 0.567 years, respectively, with 47.7% girls and 52.3% boys. Missing values were imputed by using the linear interpolation method in SPSS.

#### **3.2 Instruments**

## *3.2.1 Thinking creatively in action and movement (TCAM)*

The TCAM test was used to measure children's creativity. As the subjects were Chinese, we used the revised Chinese version by Chang [41], which was fully validated. The TCAM consists of four activities with the first, third, and fourth activities scoring both children's fluency and originality in creativity, while the second activity scores imagination. Fluency measures cumulatively in how many ways do children react. Originality measures the uniqueness of responses based on a large cardinal number of participants tested in the Taiwan Chinese version. And, imagination measures how many unique scenes children could act out.

The details of the four activities are as follows. Activity one (How many ways?) asks children to use diverse ways to get from one place to another. Activity two (Can you move like a tree/rabbit/fish/snake?) asks children to pretend to be something or to play a prescribed role (driving a car at high speed and pushing an elephant away

*Indirect Effects of Parenting Style on the Relationship between Maternal Personality… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102378*


#### **Table 1.**

*Mean, SD, and Cronbach's α for the three constructs in creativity in test and retest and ICC.*

from desired things). Activity three (What other ways?) asks children to use diverse ways to put a number of paper cups into a box. The last activity (What might it be?) requires children to think about playing with and using paper cups. Testing one child takes around 30 minutes. Each activity was restricted to 10 minutes with a total time of under 30 minutes.

All activities were conducted in the kindergartens' activity rooms, which provided enough space for children to move around freely. A five-minute warm-up exercise was used so that the children feel relaxed and trust the experimenter. We complied strictly with the TCAM (Taiwan version) test manual.

TCAM-Taiwan version has already been validated by Chang [41] in Chinese writing. We obtained consent from parents for the digital recording of participants' movements in the testing areas. The dataset was scored again 2 weeks later by the same trained research assistant. The test-retest reliabilities of the first to fourth activities and the overall scores were, respectively, 0.72, 0.76, 0.70 and 0.60, and 0.75.

Following Zachopoulou et al. [42], the reliabilities were assessed via means, SD and reliability of internal consistency Cronbach's α in test and retest, and the Intraclass correlation (ICC). These results are reported in **Table 1**.

In **Table 1**, the means, SD, and reliability of internal consistency α's are all very similar between test and retest. The means for fluency, originality, and imagination are, respectively, 25.82, 25.12, and 15.46 with the corresponding SD being 19.5, 19.5, and 3.4. These values are comparable with Zachopoulou et al. [42]. The temporal stability of TCAM was examined using the intraclass correlation (ICC) between test and retest, which were at least 0.93. The test was reliable.

#### *3.2.2 Chinese big five personality inventory (CBF-PI)*

Maternal personality was measured by Wang et al. [43] the Chinese Big Five Personality Inventory (CBF-PI) brief version, with the original version created by McCrae and Costa [44]. It uses a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (=extremely disagree) to 6 (=extremely agree), and has five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN), with eight items for each. CBF-PI has been validated and has internal consistency reliabilities ranging from 0.764 (Agreeableness) to 0.814 (Neuroticism). The test-retest reliabilities range from 0.672 (Agreeableness) to 0.811 (Openness) [43]. Here, the reliabilities of internal consistency for OCEAN and the overall scales are, respectively, 0.799, 0.784, 0.716, 0.705, 0.778, and 0.790.

#### *3.2.3 Parental authority questionnaire (PAQ )*

Parenting styles were measured by the Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ ) [45], with the Chinese translated version validated by Deng [46]. It uses a 5-point

Likert scale, ranging from 1 (=extremely disagree) to 5 (=extremely agree), with 30 items, three dimensions (authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive), and 10 items in each dimension. The reliabilities of internal consistency for authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive dimensions are, respectively, 0.72, 0.77, and 0.76 in Reitman et al. [45]'s original study; 0.78, 0.70, and 0.68 in Deng [46]; and 0.73, 0.71, and 0.62 in the present study.
