Trajectories of Change in Creative and Personal Factors in First-Year Creative Arts Therapies Students

There is little research on the transformational processes of creative arts therapies (CATs) students during training compared to other healthcare professions. CATs training relies on arts-based experiential learning that can develop the therapist’s creative self-beliefs, psychological mindedness, and perspective-taking. This single group pre–post study examined the changes in these unstudied, yet essential, creative and personal factors in a sample of 191 CATs students in the first year of their master’s degree program in Israel. It was hypothesized that students would report a statistically significant increase in creative and personal measures from the beginning to the end of their first year of training, but this hypothesis was only partially supported. There were different development trajectories in each CATs discipline in terms of creative identity, creative self-efficacy, psychological mindedness, and perspective-taking. The discussion sheds light on these results by considering the domain-specific differences between the CATs disciplines and their respective training approaches, and through follow-up interview data collected from trainers in each CATs track. This study thus contributes to a better understanding of the trajectories of change of these attributes in CATs students. Training programs should consider these results when building curricula, to nurture the balance between students’ artistic and helping competencies.