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Allison Smith
Professor Schur
Honors 205
9 March 2018
Effectiveness of Disciplinary Humor
Research Proposal

Previous studies have identified that humor can be used as a tool to affirm social norms,

rules, and social hierarchies (Holmes, 2000; Horton, 2009; Sutton et al., 2009; Franzén and

Aronsson, 2013). Furthermore, research has found that teachers use humor to emphasize and

reaffirm socially acceptable behavior in their students (Sutton et al. 2009). Despite its use,

behavior-enforcing humor used within a school setting has not been investigated by terms of its

effectiveness. Therefore, I propose a study assessing the effectiveness of disciplinary humor used

by teachers on students in junior high school.

To perform this study, clear definitions will be set out for disciplinary humor and humor

along with how effectiveness will be determined. This type of socially acceptable behavior-

enforcing humor can be, and has been, described as disciplinary humor (Franzén and Aronsson,

2013). Disciplinary humor consists of instances when humor is used as a disciplinary mechanism

to redirect actions and/or instances where asymmetrical relationships, one individual is more

powerful than another/others, are emphasized to confirm or change behavior of the less

powerful. For this study, humor will be defined as “utterances which are identified by the analyst

[or performer], on the basis of paralinguistic, prosody and discoursal clues, as intended by the

speaker(s) to be amusing and perceived to be amusing by [at least one recipient]” (Holmes,

2000). This definition is not all inclusive of humor, as attempted humor that is not recognized by

the receiver does not count as humor. However, this definition does provide a clear definition of
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humor. Effectiveness of disciplinary humor will be determined by the number of disciplinary

referrals a teacher’s student receives during the time of the study.

For this study, a total of five schools will be assessed; each school having at six junior

high school teachers and a minimum of twenty students in the teacher’s class. For each school,

three different conditions will be applied by two teachers for each condition. The conditions will

be: use of disciplinary humor only for discipline, use of disciplinary humor (and other methods)

for discipline, and no use of disciplinary humor for discipline. Before beginning the study,

teachers will be trained on the definitions previously described and go through a observational

period (with mock students) to ensure they are able to perform their condition in practice. Data

will be collected over a two school-year period and then analyzed using a two-way ANOVA test

to determine whether the use of disciplinary humor impacts the number of disciplinary referrals

obtained by the teacher’s students, where p < 0.05 will represent a significant interaction

between these variables.

This research will explore both an underexplored topic, the use of disciplinary humor by

teachers, and a novel topic, the effectiveness of this type of humor by teachers. Furthermore, this

study would result in valuable information regarding the teacher’s use of humor and its influence

over student’s behaviors. Results from this study could increase the understanding of a teacher’s

role in student’s behavior and how schools should train teachers to discipline students to increase

students’ socially acceptable behavior.

Literature Review

One study of interest related to my research analyzes the use of humor as it relates to

authority, in the form of social norms or standards, in Puritan New England (Horton, 2009). This
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article analyzes how petticoats, an article of clothing popular in the 1700s for women as an

underskirt, were critiqued and viewed in society using humor. Horton claims in this article that

petticoats served to play role in straying from authority and reinforcing social order in Puritan

New England. The data collected for this research consists of literature and works which refers to

petticoats and uses humor in its language retrieved from the time of interest, when petticoats

were first introduced to society and the years following, and location of interest, New England.

The study concludes that petticoats provided Puritan women freedom from gender norms during

this time, but also enforced normative social order perceptions as jokes were made at the expense

of those whom decided to wear petticoats. The inferences and conclusions drawn in this article

are subjective to the author, limiting the credibility of the analysis; however, the author

strengthens his evaluation of the data by including multiple examples and clear explanations of

the examples leading to his conclusions. As humor was used to reinforce social order, this article

supports the idea that humor can be used as a manner of indirectly affirming the rules and

regulations governing a society.

“Teachers’ Emotion Regulation and Classroom Management” by Sutton et al. provides

insight to my research as well. This study determines how teachers try to modify their own

emotions in terms of intensity and duration in order to more effectively manage students,

discipline students, and create relationships with students. This study was performed in order to

better understand how teachers’ emotion regulation impacts classroom management. The data

collected was broken into three categories: teachers’ goals for emotion regulation, goals; their

beliefs on the effectiveness of showing their emotions, outcome expectancies; and their

confidence in their ability to communicate positive emotions and decrease negative emotions,

emotion regulation efficacy (Sutton et al. 2009). This data was collected via self-report through
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interviews with teachers; thus, the data relies on the honesty of the teachers’ and the teachers’

beliefs about their own effectiveness. Due to this self-reporting method, the data collected is

limited in its ability to be unbiased. The study concluded that teachers believe when they regulate

their emotions, they are more effective at managing the classroom. It also noted that while most

teachers try to reduce their negative emotions, these negative emotions, such as anger, sometimes

aid in enforcing accepted classroom behavior; thus, they can be effective too. The finding that is

insightful to my personal research is that teachers were found to use joking to modify situations

or to prevent negative situations; therefore, as a way for the teacher to lead a situation to proceed

in an appropriate or acceptable manner. A major limitation of this research is that no “good

research evidence” was determined on the balance between positive and negative emotions of

teachers to maximize classroom effectiveness or management (Sutton et al. 2009). However, this

research provides analysis to an under-researched topic: teachers’ emotional management and its

effect on perceived classroom effectiveness.

The next study which provides insight into my personal research examines the use of

humor within professional workplaces in New Zealand government departments. The purposes

of this study were to analyze effective interpersonal communication features within the

workplace sociologically and to explore the result’s implication in New Zealand workplaces. The

data analyzed for this study consisted of recorded interactions of participants while at work. The

data consisted of over 120 hours of footage with 200 instances of humor analyzed. One major

limitation of this study is the need of a clear definition for humor in order to determine which

interactions were humorous. Thus, humor was defined as “utterances which are identified by the

analyst, on the basis of paralinguistic, prosody and discoursal clues, as intended by the speaker(s)

to be amusing and perceived to be amusing by at least some participants” (Holmes, 2000). Note
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that this definition failed to acknowledge instances of failed humor and unintended humor, but

does highlight the interactional achievement of humor based on its recognition by the

participant(s). This article focuses on explaining humor by politeness theory, repressive humor,

and competitive humor. In politeness theory, humor operates to express friendliness between

equals in which humor was good-willed and used for cooperative purposes. In repressive humor,

humor emphasized asymmetrical relationships where a more powerful participant used humor to

control the behavior of the less powerful. The use of humor made this an acceptable way to

coerce willing behavior without needing to explicitly ordering someone into a behavior.

Contestive humor challenged existing asymmetrical relationships, where the subordinates

challenge the power structure or de-emphasize the power differential present, implying a

persuasive goal to the humor used. From this study, it was concluded that humor serves multiple

functions within the workplace, but ultimately acts to create and maintain the solidarity and

collegiality of the workplace. While contestive humor may seem to contradict this conclusion, it

does not as this type of humor offers a friendly, more polite way of offering criticism of power

rather than serving to disrupt the social cohesion. Furthermore, it was found that most of the

humor used could be explained by politeness theory, but not all instances of humor fell under

this theory. A great strength of this study was the use of a clear definition of the data analyzed as

humor and that the interactions were not based on participants’ self-reporting, increasing

reliability of the data and decreasing memory limitations. However, the participants could delete

material they wished not to be analyzed (in hopes of enhancing research-participant

relationships) which limited the amount of data analyzed. The finding/data in this article that is

relevant to my study likes in the use of repressive humor used in instances to reaffirm the power
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and social hierarchy without disrupting the social cohesion of the workplace. This type of humor

closely resembles disciplinary humor in its use and function.

Franzén and Aronsson’s “Teasing, Laughing and disciplinary humor: Staff-youth

interaction in detention home treatment” investigates how disciplinary humor shapes and

reshapes social order in intergenerational interactions. This study defines disciplinary humor as

“joking events between staff members and residents that involve both disciplinary features and

laughing/teasing (Franzén and Aronsson, 2013); these events of disciplinary humor served as the

analytic units of investigation, or data, for the study. To aid in recognizing these instances, the

researchers used laughter, smiles, second jokes, and verbal acknowledgements of humorous

material. The data was obtained through video recordings, participant observations, and

interviews. From the data examined, the researchers determined that disciplinary humor was

used by authority figures, staff members, to confirm local hierarchies and generational

hierarchies when youth attempted to negotiate these hierarchies. Additionally, the study found

that humor was used to enforce local rules of conduct within the detention home. They also

noted that humor is ambiguous in that it can be interpreted in various ways and unintended ways

by the participants. One flaw in the research design of this experiment include possible

misinterpretation of disciplinary humor events by the researches when analyzing data, especially

as the researches note that humor can vary in its interpretation. The strength in this research is

that the data collected occurred over a long-time span, two years, and relied on multiple

strategies to identify the use of disciplinary humor (recordings, observations, and interviews);

this increased the amount of data collected for analysis. This study aids my research as it gives a

definition of disciplinary humor and demonstrates that this type of humor influences the behavior

of its intended audience in order to better follow rules and authoritative hierarchies.
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In a study performed by Bradley Schnautz, the effectiveness of a school program where

mentors are used to enhance the achievement of “at-risk” junior high school students in the

United States. Schnautz used attendance, discipline referrals, report card grades averages,

standardized test scores, and reading scale scores over a two school-year period to determine the

effectiveness of students in the treatment group, those attending the program, versus students in a

control group, those not attending the program. The study determined that the school program

did significantly lower the number of student’s discipline referrals and standardized test scores;

however, no differences were found in report card grade averages, attendance, or reading scale

scores. Thus, while school mentor programs do have a positive impact on students, these

programs can be furthered to increase their effectiveness in the factors previously notes.

Although the sample size of this study, 70 students, and sample size, only one school, are

weaknesses to this paper as it limits the inference space of the conclusion, the number of factors

the researcher limits in the study strengthens his findings along with his in-depth statistical data

analysis. This study is useful to my research in terms of its design and the finding (and literature

cited to support) that mentors, a form of authority figures, can change the behavior of their

mentees. While this study does not focus specifically on humor in relation to behavior changes,

the concept that the actions and words of an authoritative figure can change the way one acts

supports the idea that humor, with its distinct characteristics, could be conveyed by an authority

figure in order to change the behavior of those the humor is addressing. The design used in this

study aids in the creation of mine as a similar setting is used and the study addresses how it

limited various factors which could have impacted data, such as age, time in the mentoring

program, sex, etc.

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Works Cited

Franzén, Anna and Aronsson, Karin. (2013). Teasing, laughing and disciplinary humor: Staff-

youth interaction in detention home treatment. Discourse Studies, 15(2): 167-183.

Holmes, Janet. (2000). Politeness, power and provocation: how humour functions in the

workplace. Discourse Studies, 2(2): 159-185.

Horton, Shaun. (2009). Of Pastors and Petticoats: Humor and Authority in Puritan New England.

The New England Quarterly, 82(4): 608-636.

Quinn, Beth A. (2000). The Paradox of Complaining: Law, Humor, and Harassment in the

Everyday Work World. Law & Social Inquiry, 25(4): 1151-1185.

Schnautz, Bradley Michael. (2014). The Effects of School-Based Mentoring on Student

Achievement for Junior High School Students. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M

University. Retrieved from:

http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/153847/SCHNAUTZ-

RECORDOFSTUDY-2014.pdf?sequence=1.

Sutton, Rosemary E., Mudrey-Camino, Reneé, and Knight, Catharine C. (2009). Teachers’

Emotion Regulation and Classroom Management. Theory into Practice, 48(2): 130-137.