Abstract
This study explores the psychologically neglected concept of fun, a concept that contributes strongly to many people’s perceptions of quality in life, and looks both at the different types of behaviour that people regard as fun and the atti-tudes that people have towards fun. Through focus groups and interviews, a 40-item attitude questionnaire was devel-oped and completed by 1100 people. Factor analysis identified five attitudinal factors, which were labelled as “Fun involving risk-taking”; “Fun dependent on fun people”; “Fun causing happiness”; “Money needed to have fun”; and “Spontaneity as fun”. These different factors showed different patterns of correlation with demographic and personality measures. The different types of situation that people described as fun were assessed by asking participants to use an adjective check-list to describe a situation they had found to be fun. Factor analysis identified five types of fun (“Sociability”, “Contentment”, “Achievement”, “Sensual” and “Ecstatic”), the different types correlating systematically with participants’ demography, personality and attitudes to fun. Although often used as if it were a single concept, “fun” is actually a complex phenomenon that has different meanings for different types of people.
Highlights
If searching for an epithet for the Zeitgeist of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the word “fun” might well be suitable
This study explores the psychologically neglected concept of fun, a concept that contributes strongly to many people’s perceptions of quality in life, and looks both at the different types of behaviour that people regard as fun and the attitudes that people have towards fun
We provide a taxonomy of the types of activities or experiences that people include under the heading of fun, and secondly we examine how the various types of fun experience chosen are related to demographic factors such as age, sex and social class; to personality; and to education and to science education
Summary
If searching for an epithet for the Zeitgeist of the opening years of the twenty-first century, the word “fun” might well be suitable. The colloquial term ‘fun’ is better understood by students and teachers (and researchers), and carries connotations of positive affect that ‘intrinsic motivation’ may not” [27] This forces fun into the conceptual mould of intrinsic motivation, while accepting that that may not be how participants themselves understand it. “Fun, Fun, Fun”: Types of Fun, Attitudes to Fun, and their Relation to Personality and Biographical Factors single theoretical concept already described within psychology such as leisure, flow or intrinsic motivation. We asked how the types of fun and attitudes towards fun related to participation in a range of cultural and aesthetic activities that we have studied extensively before, and which are often described as being done for fun [30] This is inevitably an exploratory study, but it is in the research tradition on lay theories of happiness [31,32,33], but this time looking at fun
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