Construct validity and internal consistency reliability of the Humour Styles Questionnaire

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Introduction

There has been a current push to inspect useful sides of the human state. Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, & Weir (2003) supported the optimistic psychology faction in which psychologists were asked to pay attention on the fundamentals of human resilience and flexibility. Research scrutinised such topics as optimism coping, hope, and courage (Lefcourt, 2003). Until of late humour has been principally left out of the optimistic psychologist’s area of interest. This is unexpected since it could be stated that humour is the essence of the optimistic psychology faction since it is the exact opposite to melancholy and hopelessness. It is omnipresent in daily lives and human experience.  No group or culture has been found by the anthropologists that does not have mirth or humour. Humour has the supremacy to lessen physical and mental pain (Martin, 2001). According to de Koning & Weiss (2002) and Richman (1995) humour has been associated with a broad array of positive outcomes, for instant, life satisfaction, martial pleasure, coping with tension, diseases survival such as cancer, and suicide prevention. Regrettably, the scientific knowledge of humour influences the anecdotal faith that it is a unanimously imperative element of the human state.  The majority of research on this subject is sporadic, requires solid methodology, and falls short to be reproduced.

Also, a good sense of humour is regarded as a personal quality that can restrained the influence of stressors in a life of a person (Lefcourt, 2001). It is believed to help an individual engage in optimistic reframing, and imaginative reinterpretation of happenings to reduce the pessimistic impact linked to stressors and tensions of life (Abel & Maxwell, 2002). These are comparatively simple uses of humour to improve the self and to improve one's relationships with others, utilisation of humour to augment the self at the cost of others, and use of humour to make the relationships better at the cost of self.

Humour has been the great interest of psychologists as well who have been studying it all the way through the 20th century. They have been focusing on the likely benefits of humour on psychosocial well-being and health of individuals (Snyder & McCullough, 2000; Martin, 2001). Due to this interest, researchers have worked to develop some sort of measuring tools to measure the humour. These measures purportedly evaluate such aspects of humour as the extent to which people smile and laugh in a broad range of situations, utilise humour as a mean of coping issues, perceive and benefit from humour, etc. A significant level of validation support has been also been discovered for a number of these measurements (Martin, 1996). The intention of this paper is to develop a humour measure that triumphs flaws over the present measures.

Humour Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) is one of the most valuable means of measurement of humour and this questionnaire considers humour as a multidimensional trait.  It aims at people’s sense of humour that may be positive or negative in nature. The Humour Styles Questionnaire is the result of work by Rod A. Martin (et al., 2003).  It tries to capture the dissimilarities in how persons characteristically use or convey humour and whether its utilisation is helpful or deleterious for the happiness of individual’s social surroundings.  Its development is mainly derived from a sense-of-humour model which regards humor as adaptive against maladaptive and self- against other-directed as, and it hypothesizes four individual difference aspects of humor, namely, affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating humor (Martin et al, 2003).  

(1) Affiliative, in which humour is used to encourage group unity and is characterised by jokes telling and making fun at which everyone can securely laugh at and experience included in a happy-companionship. It is the benign and non-competitive humour style. People who are high on this aspect are inclined to say humorous things, tell jokes, and take on a duty to amuse others, to make relationships possible, and to decrease interpersonal apprehensions (Lefcourt, 2001).

(2)  Self-enhancing humour: This style is characterised by the use of humour by an individual on an individual level. It is an inclination to be entertained by a variety of things in a person’s life, also when an individual faces with complicated or worrying situations (Frewen, Brinker, Martin, & Dozois, 2008).

(3) Aggressive humour.  The aggressive humour style is related to using humour to disparage, manipulate or threat others; it is destructive for group cohesion and can lead to in-group divisions and suffering of certain individuals (Cann, & Calhoun, 2001).

(4) Self-defeating humour. This humour style could, sequentially, be utilized by the poor ginger kid to aim to alleviate the consequences of the aggressive humour: the self-defeating style entails permuting others to make jokes at an individual’s expense and pretending that the individual having fun along the way; it is also a tendency to use the self-deprecating humour to amuse others (Snyder & McCullough, 2000).

Two of these dimensions are regarded to be encouraging to psychosocial well-being, while the rest of the two are assumed to be less benign and likely deleterious to human welfare.

Several studies have often tried to validate these four different styles. A study by Saroglou and Scariot (2002) validated the all four humour styles by the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). They found four humour styles distinct with respect to the personality. Self-enhancing and social humour styles were found to be positively linked to self-esteem, Openness, and Agreeableness, while hostile humour style was found to be negatively linked to Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. Self-defeating humour was negatively related to Emotional Stability, Conscientiousness, and self-esteem. Likewise, Fox, Dean and Lyford (2011) developed a reliable as well as valid scale i.e. Humour Styles Questionnaire to evaluate maladaptive and adaptive humor in children and remained successful in developing it.  They found self-defeating and affiliative humor to be related to all four psychosocial adjustment measures. On the other hand, aggressive humour was discovered to be related to reduced anxiety and increased self-perceived social capability for boys, and increased depression with reduced global self-worth for girls. A number of other studies also provide strong evidence for the validity of these four different styles across miscellaneous cultures and groups (Kazarian & Martin, 2004; Chen & Martin, 2007; Vernon, Martin, Schermer, & Mackie, 2008; Hampes, 2006; Saroglou & Scariot, 2002). On the other hand, at certain places, it was not found to be reliable, for example, a research by Sullivan, Philip and Dithurbide (2007) was based on validating the psychometric properties of the HSQ on several athletes’ samples. They determined the four styles of HSQ for internal consistency. However, the HSQ did not emerge to comprise satisfactory psychometric properties for utilization in sport psychology. 

Thus, the current study was designed to examine the validity and internal consistency reliability properties of the Humour Styles Questionnaire among psychology students.

Method

Participants

Data used in this study were collected as part of assessment in the third year psychology unit, Advanced Research Methods at the University of Western Sydney, between 2009 and 2015. The sample (N = 974, participated ones =902, 539 were female, males= 363, age 16-65, M = .6, SD = .49) was drawn from students undertaking the unit. Participation was voluntary and respondents remained anonymous. Detailed demographic information was not collected, but a diverse multicultural sample is assumed.

Materials

Humour Styles Questionnaire. Derived from the situations, the HSQ-32 was developed. The HSQ comprised of 32 items (questions), testing all four styles of humours. Participants were asked to respond via a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (1 means Strongly Disagree) to 7 (7 stands for Strongly Agree). The 32 items contained 8 items from each of the four styles of humour.

Procedure

The present study is an analysis of existing data, originally collected with the same general procedure: students were asked to complete the HSQ online. Instructions for completing the survey were taken from Martin et al (2003). Means and standard deviations were first found out for four humour styles and for genders. An independence T test was performed to determine the difference between gender difference and four types of humours. In order to find out correlation of HSQ, a Pearson’s correlation was used and for internal consistencies of the HSQ Cronbach alphas was performed. All the statistical analysis was performed via SPSS.

Results

Means and standard deviations for the four Humour Styles Questionnaire for all contributors, and for genders (males and females individually) are presented in Table 1 in appendix.

HSQ Factor Analysis

By means of Varimax rotation a principal components analysis was calculated on the 32 items. The scree plot pointed that a use of 4-factor solution for this study was most favorable. The Rotation Sums for first four factors were 4.259, 3.809, 3.769 and 3.187 and comprising 13.309%, 11.904%, 11.779% and 9.961% of the total variance (Table 4). The items were examined loaded on all of four rotated factors and highlighted those factor that were loaded most strongly on (Table 5). Four items were found to be more strongly loaded items on first factor corresponded to the original affiliative scale and included Aff1 (Q1), Aff4 (Q13), Aff6 (Q21), and Aff6 (Q21). Five of the items were loaded on the second factor with respect to the original self-enhancing humour while seven were on the third factor with regard to self-defeating humor scale. Likewise, five items were loaded strongly on the fourth factor corresponding to the aggressive humour. 

Deviation Of Types Vs. Gender Difference

In order to check the gender differences the significance levels of t test was applied. The following results were obtained as shown in Table 2 (see appendix).

Males and females both attained almost equal scores on all four types of humours, although there was a mild difference due to difference in the sample size of male and female population.  A significant difference was nevertheless noticed among males and females with respect to Affiliative and Aggressive humour. Expectedly, males population reported a much greater inclination to indulge in aggressive types of humour for example ridicule, mockery, and ‘critical remark humour, as designated by higher mean scores on the Aggressive humour type (male M= 4.01, female M = 3.36, t (902) p < 0.05). The same was found for the Affiliative humour type (male M= 6.05, female M= 5.88, t (902) p >0.05).

Correlations Of The Validity Of HSQ

In order to construct validity of HSQ a Pearson’s correlation was performed using the only one part of four types of humours out of eight for the purpose of easiness. The following results were obtained as shown in table 3.

The Pearson correlation coefficient r for Aff1 and SE1 is 0.261, and it is statistically significant because p < 0.0005. The Pearson correlation coefficient r for Agg1 and SD1 is 0.67 and it is also statistically significant.

Cronbach Alphas For Internal Consistencies

The internal consistencies of the HSQ based on the data from 902 participants using Cronbach alphas showed that all four types of humours have adequate internal consistencies, as presented in table 4 (appendix).

The Cronbach's alpha is 0.855, which specifies a high level of internal consistency for the given four scales with this particular sample. The intercorrelations among these four types of humour were generally quite high, indicating that they determined dimensions that were comparatively similar from one another.

Discussion

The adult Humor Styles Questionnaire was adapted for students of psychology aged 19 years and upwards. Males and females showed almost equal scores but the only different finding were the gender difference for affiliative and aggressive humour. The findings of this study have revealed that the HSQ is suitable for use with the psychology student of mean age 25.  The findings have also shown a validity of use of HSQ in psychology. Furthermore, the males’ population demonstrated higher tendency towards an aggressive style of humour compared to female population. This was corresponding to the findings of Underwood (2003) and Martin et al. (2003), which have found that males are usually more aggressive as compared to females, at least when there is a physical and verbal kinds of aggression.  A tendency towards affiliative type of humour was also found to be higher among males. This study has showed on an acceptable level of internal reliability as well consistency of Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) scale.

The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) explores humour considering it as a multidimensional attribute. It measures individuals normally engage in four diverse styles of humour. It may be negative or positive in content. The consequential four styles are affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, self-defeating humor and aggressive humor. Self-enhancing humour can be regarded as an ability employed to tackle stress in a practical way (Frewen, Brinker, Martin, & Dozois, 2008). This type entails a commonly humorous viewpoint on life, an inclination to be recurrently entertained by the incongruities of life and to preserve a funny perspective despite the stress or hardship.Aggressive humour basically relates to the utilisation of ridicule, sarcasm, derision, teasing, disparagement, critical remark humour. It also involves the use of humour to influence others via an implied warning of mockery (Janes & Olson, 2000). Affiliative style of humour is anticipated to be associated with cheerfulness, extraversion, self-worth, closeness, relationship contentment, and chiefly positive emotions and moods (Kwon, 2002). Self-defeating humour style makes fun of other.  The findings of this study suggest that HSQ reliably can be measured using these four styles of humour.

Conclusion

A validity and reliability of HSQ scale were determined among psychology students and it was found to be valid and reliable. Future work and more research are needed to evaluate the longitudinal relationships among psychosocial adjustment measures and the four styles of humour including the usage of peer ratings of humour to offer further validation of this HSQ.

Reference list

Cann, A., & Calhoun, L. G. (2001). Perceived personality associations with differences in sense of humor: Stereotypes of hypothetical others with high or low senses of humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 14(2), 117-130.

Cayirdag, N., & Acar, S. (2010). Relationship between styles of humor and divergent thinking. Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2, 3236–3240. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.494

Chen, G.-H., & Martin, R. A. (2007). A comparison of humor styles, coping humor, and mental health between Chinese and Canadian university students. Humor, 20, 215–234.

de Koning, E., & Weiss, R. L. (2002). The Relational Humor Inventory: Functions of humor in close relationships. American Journal of Family Therapy, 30(1), 1-18.

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Eysenck, H. J. (1972). Foreword. In J. H. Goldstein, & P. E. McGhee (Eds.), The psychology of humor: Theoretical perspectives and empirical issues. (pp. xxii-xvii). New York: Academic Press.

Fox, C.L., Dean, S & Lyford, K. (2011). Development of a Humour Styles Questionnaire for children. International Journal of Humor Studies, 1-38.

Hampes, W. P. (2006). Humor and shyness: The relation between humor styles and shyness. Humor, 19, 179–187.

Janes, L.M. , & Olson, J. M.(2000). Jeer pressure: The behavioral effects of observing ridicule of others.Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 474–485.

Kazarian, S. S., & Martin, R. A. (2004). Humor styles, personality, and well-being among Lebanese university students. European Journal of Personality, 18, 209–219.

Kwon, P. (2002). Hope, defense mechanisms, and adjustment: Implications for false hope and defensive hopelessness. Journal of Personality, 70(2), 207-231.

Lefcourt, H. M. (2003). Humor as a Moderator of Life Stress in Adults. In C. E. Schaefer (Ed.), Play Therapy with Adults (pp. 144-165). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Martin, A. R., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality(37), 48-75.

Martin, R. A. (2007). The psychology of humor: an integrative approach. Burlington: Elsevier Academic Press.

Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48-75

Martin, R.A. (2001).Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 504–519.

Martin, R.A., & Kuiper, N.A.(1999). Daily occurrence of laughter: Relationships with age, gender, and Type A personality. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 12, 355–384.

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Saroglou, V., & Scariot, C. (2002). Humor Styles Questionnaire: Personality and educational correlates in Belgian high school and college students. European Journal of Personality, 16, 43–54

Saroglou, V. and Scariot, C. (2002). Humor Styles Questionnaire: personality and educational correlates in Belgian high school and college students. 16 (1), 43–54

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Sullivan, Philip J., and Lori Dithurbide. (2007). The psychometric properties of the humor styles questionnaire with a sample of athletes. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 29, 207-207.

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Appendix

Table 1 Descriptive Statistic
	Participant Gender N	Mean	Std. Deviation
Aff	Male	6.05	1.140
	Female	5.88	1.171
SEQ	Male	4.87	1.614
	Female	4.75	1.542
SD	Male	3.75	1.778
	Female	3.5	1.806
Agg	Male	4.01	1.774
	Female	3.36	1.766

Table 2
Independent T Test
Total sample                                                T test
		Males  (Mean)	Females (Mean)	Signif. (2 tail)
Aff	902	6.05	5.88	>0.05
SEQ	902	4.87	4.75	>0.05
Agg	902	4.01	3.36	<0.05
SD	902	3.75	3.5	=0.05

Table 4
Cronbach alpha for all contributors (n = 902) Reliability Statistics
Cronbach's Alpha	Cronbach's Alpha Based on Standardized Items	N of Items
.855	.864	32

Table 3
Pearson’s Correlations
		Aff1 (Q1)	SE1 (Q2)	Agg1 (Q3)	SD1 (Q4)
Aff1 (Q1)	Pearson Correlation	1	.261**	.126**	.067*
	Sig. (2-tailed)		.000	.000	.042
	N	902	902	902	902
SE1 (Q2)	Pearson Correlation	.261**	1	.097**	.013
	Sig. (2-tailed)	.000		.003	.692
	N	908	908	908	902
Agg1 (Q3)	Pearson Correlation	.126**	.097**	1	.131**
	Sig. (2-tailed)	.000	.003		.000
	N	908	908	908	902
SD1 (Q4)	Pearson Correlation	.067*	.013	.131**	1
	Sig. (2-tailed)	.042	.692	.000
	N	902	902	902	902

Table 4
Total Variance Explained
Component	Initial Eigenvalues			Rotation Sums of Squared Loadings
	Total	% of Variance	Cumulative %	Total	% of Variance	Cumulative %
1	6.359	19.872	19.872	4.259	13.309	13.309
2	3.797	11.866	31.738	3.809	11.904	25.213
3	2.688	8.399	40.137	3.769	11.779	36.992
4	2.181	6.817	46.953	3.187	9.961	46.953
5	1.133	3.540	50.493
6	1.053	3.290	53.783
7	.990	3.095	56.878
8	.943	2.948	59.826
9	.839	2.623	62.449
10	.806	2.517	64.967
11	.790	2.468	67.435
12	.721	2.253	69.687
13	.704	2.199	71.886
14	.670	2.095	73.981
15	.650	2.030	76.011
16	.626	1.956	77.967
17	.591	1.847	79.814
18	.580	1.813	81.626
19	.554	1.730	83.356
20	.546	1.705	85.062
21	.515	1.609	86.671
22	.504	1.574	88.245
23	.488	1.525	89.770
24	.461	1.441	91.211
25	.440	1.376	92.587
26	.428	1.338	93.926
27	.413	1.292	95.217
28	.389	1.215	96.432
29	.356	1.113	97.545
30	.293	.916	98.460
31	.263	.821	99.282
32	.230	.718	100.000
Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.

Table 5 Rotated Component Matrixa
	Component
	1	2	3	4
Aff1 (Q1)	.720	.109	.042	.061
Agg1 (Q3)	.137	.062	.119	.640
SD1 (Q4)	-.004	-.007	.647	.027
SE1 (Q2)	.217	.666	-.006	-.016
Aff2 (Q5)	.598	.211	.018	.144
SE2 (Q6)	.268	.429	.204	.039
Agg2 (Q7)	-.067	-.046	.066	.529
SD2 (Q8)	.082	.063	.795	.109
Aff3 (Q9)	.519	.071	.227	.035
SE3 (Q10)	.030	.815	.064	.005
Agg3 (Q11)	-.049	.151	.008	.617
SD3 (Q12)	.046	.062	.696	.098
Aff4 (Q13)	.763	.158	-.020	.081
SE4 (Q14)	.240	.646	-.026	.007
Agg4 (Q15)	.083	-.002	.128	.612
SD4 (Q16)	.138	-.020	.646	.191
Aff5 (Q17)	.795	.099	.076	.088
SE5 (Q18)	.037	.825	.038	.001
Agg5 (Q19)	.158	.228	.229	.512
SD5 (Q20)	-.032	.090	.784	.173
Aff6 (Q21)	.731	.142	.086	-.070
SE6 (Q22)	.095	.544	-.030	.091
Agg6 (Q23)	.172	.010	.107	.656
SD6 (Q24)	-.138	-.020	.604	.110
Aff6 (Q21)	.807	.116	-.011	.082
SE7 (Q26)	.089	.735	.173	-.017
Agg7 (Q27)	.005	.005	.219	.594
SD7 (Q28)	.106	.237	.276	.051
Aff8 (Q29)	.567	.170	-.123	.136
SE8 (Q30)	.134	.507	.033	.126
Agg8 (Q31)	.146	-.022	.003	.699
SD8 (Q32)	.115	.119	.672	.100