Determinants of Artistic Interests in Adolescence: The Importance of Personal and Contextual Factors

The need for artistic creativity is inherent to all children, but as they grow up, the meaning of artistic expression and interest in artistic creativity changes. Entering adolescence, artistic expression for children ceases to be a part of play and begins to represent child's personality and enduring interests, which is why only some children remain interested in artistic creativity and art. In this paper, we discuss the important determinants of artistic interests in adolescence on a sample of 981 last grade students (67.2 % girls, mean age 18 years). The results indicated that the total of 40% of variance of artistic interests is explained by personality traits and personal values, while the importance of family contextual variables was negligible. Among personal factors, the most prominent role of openness to experience was observed, followed by self-actualization values and extraversion, and to some extent by emotionality and utilitarian values. People with greater artistic interest are more open to new experiences, less extraverted, slightly more emotional, and they also place greater importance on self-actualizing values and somewhat lower importance on utilitarian (materialistic) values. Further, the importance of family intellectual-cultural climate for development of artistic interests in adolescence is very weak, and is likely indirect, through personality traits.