A Study on the Nurses' Appreciation and Use of Humor

Jun, Jum Yi; Kim, Myo Sung

Abstract

PURPOSE
This study is a descriptive research study to develop the Nurse's Humor Questionnaire, and then analyze humor's appreciation and use by Korean nurses. METHOD: The three stages used to develop the questionnaire were to make a conceptual framework, make an open questionnaire through the 2nd preliminary inquiry, and make a structured questionnaire based on collected statements through the developed open questionnaire. The subjects that carried out completely a structured questionnaire were 337 nurses. RESULT: 1) The final developed questionnaire consists of 6 domains and 67 items. The reliability of 'When feeling humor's expression'( =0.7079), 'The barrier factors of humor's use'( =0.7895), and 'Humor's values'( =0.8336) was high. 2) The results related to Humor's values of nurses that showed significant differences were as follow: (1) age, marital status, and current position (2)a negative correlation between stress and humor's values (3) humor's sources: daily life and conversation (4) frequency of used humor (5) types of used humor: word humor, imitation, adequate situation and technical terms, and (6) when using humor's expression: tense atmosphere, awkward atmosphere and adequate situation. CONCLUSION: The developed tool can be used for understanding nurse's humor. This will help to develop the humor program as a nursing intervention for health promotion.