The Scale of Ethical Attitude toward Ethnic Humor (EATEH): Development, Reliability, and Validity

Abstract

Research on ethnic humor has been centered on initiators and functions of ethnic humor, ignoring people's ethical attitudes toward this type of humor. The purpose of the present article was to develop a scale measuring the ethical attitude toward ethnic humor, named EATEH (study 1). Further, we evaluated its relation to personal distress, empathic concern, perspective taking, authoritarianism, and self-efficacy (study 2). Exploratory factor analysis favored a one-factor structure, interpreted as a general ethical attitude toward ethnic humor that accounted for 55.9% of the total variance. EATEH obtained Cronbach's alpha of .94, indicating a high reliability. Multiple regression analysis showed that EATEH had considerable unique variance that was not explained by the tested psychological constructs (study 2). Hence, our scale is a novel and objective measure for evaluating ethical attitude toward ethnic humor.