Critical and Creative Thinking in Research: Posts and Resources

by Janet Salmons, PhD Research Community Manager for Sage Research Methods Community

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Regardless of the designs or methods used to collect and analyze data, all researchers share a common need. We need to dig deeply, think broadly, and use what they learn to create new paths for understanding and addressing problems. D.F. Halpern, in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2001) described the interplay of creative and critical thinking:

Creative thinking is the production of unusual and good responses to problems…. By comparison, the thinking skills used in critical thinking could be either common or unusual. Thus, critical thinking is a superordinate of creative thinking. Critical thinking requires creativity (unusual and good solutions) in many aspects—generating alternatives to problems, redefining goals, and recognizing which critical thinking skills are needed in novel situations. There is no clear demarcation between critical and creative thinking because it is impossible to determine where one type of thinking ends and the other begins; commonly used thinking skills and unusual ones lie along a single continuum.

Think about thinking from variety of perspectives with the posts, videos, and open-access resources in this collection. If you would like to purchase Sage books on the topic, use the code MSPACEQ323 for a 20% discount on a purchase of the book, through September 2023.

Halpern, D. F. (2001). Critical Thinking, Cognitive Psychology of. In N. J. Smelser & P. B. Baltes (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 2990-2994). Pergamon. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/01586-2

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Sage Books about Critical Thinking