Humor Climate of the Primary Schools

The aim of this study is to determine the opinions primary school administrators and teachers on humor climates in primary schools. The study was modeled as a convergent parallel design, one of the mixed methods. The data gathered from 253 administrator questionnaires, and 651 teacher questionnaires was evaluated for the quantitative part of the study. The study group of the qualitative part consists of 9 administrators and 12 teachers working in the primary schools. For data collection, the researcher developed and used a semi-structured data collection form consisting of open-ended questions. Qualitative data was also gathered by observation notes. In the quantitative part, a scale was used for gathering data on schools' humor climate. A five-point Likert Scale was used in the questionnaire. Specific descriptive analyses which were conducted to calculate the quantitative data included percentage, frequency, arithmetic means, standard deviation, t-test and one-way ANOVA for unrelated sampling. Where the assumptions of one-way ANOVA were not satisfied, the Kruskal Wallis test was used. The qualitative data obtained was subjected to descriptive analysis and content analysis. The results of humor climate revealed that positive humor types were mostly used in primary schools. The beneficial effect of humor used by administrators was higher than the negative effect on school and subordinates. Parallel to these results, the study observed that positive humor climate styles were predominant in schools.