Development Of Sense Of Humor Questionnaire Of College Students

In contemporary culture sense of humor has been widely viewed as a desirable—even virtuous—personality characteristic. Individuals with a greater sense of humor were thought to be better able to cope with stress, to get along well with others, and to enjoy better mental and even physical health. Freud looked on humor as one of the healthiest defense mechanisms and Maslow considered humor as one of the fifteen personality characteristics for self-realization. With the rapid growth, humor has been paid more attention and acquired more studies in theoretical exploration and practical application. The study in mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong of China showed that Chinese students believe that humor was very important, but they were not humorous enough and they all hoped to be more humorous. So the study on humor was of great importance in theory and application.Now there are three main understanding to humor.(1) The first is that humor is a form of play with ideas, whose desired effect is to amuse others, facilitate relationships and to reduce interpersonal tensions.(2) The second is that a world view with which a person is someone who not only understands the insufficiencies and shortcomings of life and fellow humans but also tolerates, forgives them and pokes fun at them.(3) The third is that humor is a mode of interpersonal communication that is frequently used to convey implicit messages in an indirect manner and to influence other people in various ways. Because it involves playing with incongruities and contradictory ideas and conveys multiple meaning at once, humor is a particularly useful form of communication in situations in which a more serious and direct mode runs risk of being too confrontational, potentially embarrassing, or otherwise risky.In previous studies sense of humor refers to habitual individual differences in appreciation, initiation of humor. In this study sense of humor is defined as the habitual tendency of appreciating and creating humor to amuse others, cope with dilemma and indirect communication.In this study more than 70 English papers and quite a few Chinese papers were read. The operational definition of sense of humor was given. Three open-ended questionnaires were made. On the basis of 4 previous sense of humor questionnaire five dimensions were constructed which were humor appreciation, humor creation, humorous amusement, humorous communication and humorous coping and the preliminary questionnaire was developed. Two hundred and sixty-two college students were tested with the preliminary questionnaire, which was modified to form the re-test questionnaire by item analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Four hundred and seventy-one college students were tested with the re-test questionnaire, which was modified to form the formal questionnaire by item analysis and exploratory factor analysis. Five dimensions are formed in the formal questionnaire, which were humor appreciation, humor learning, humorous amusement, humorous communication and humorous coping. The formal questionnaire included 23 test items and 2 lie detection items.Six hundred and forty-six college students from Southwest University, East China Normal University, Xichang Institute of Sichuan, Science and Technology Institute of Chongqing were tested with the formal questionnaire. The internal consistency Cronbach coefficiency was 0.823, which indicated that the questionnaire was reliable. The correlation matrix and confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the construct validity of the questionnaire was good. One hundred and seven college students were tested with Humor Styles Questionnaire, Anxiety Self-appraisal Scale, Life Orientation Scale, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale and this questionnaire. The result showed that the questionnaire had good validity.The survey indicated that there were no difference between boy college students and girl college students and among those college students from different native places, but there was significant difference among those college students of different ages. These differences were discussed in discussion combined with previous studies.The following conclusions were drawn from this study:(1) Sense of humor is multi-facet and multi-dimension psychological construct, which was described with five dimensions that were humor appreciation, humor learning, humorous amusement, humorous communication and humorous coping according to the production and function of humor.(2) Sense of humor questionnaire of college students had good reliability and validity, which could be used as a good measure to test sense of humor.(3) There was difference among the college students of different ages, but no difference between boy college students and girl college students and among those college students from different native places. Further studies should be made to explore these differences.