HUMOR STYLES IN SOCIALLY MALADJUSTED GIRLS AND BOYS: A RESILIENCE PERSPECTIVE

Resilience-concept-driven research of humor in socially maladjusted youth has been prompted by an urgent need to redefine Poland's crisis-ridden rehabilitation system, through embracing rehabilitative theories and practices inspired by new frameworks and related modern intervention models. The paper presents a research project aimed at encouraging rehabilitation researchers, theoreticians, and practitioners to engage with humor as a "site of resistance" that offers juveniles a springboard to achieve expected levels of social adjustment. The study aims to identify and compare humor styles in socially maladjusted girls (n(1) = 56) and boys (n(2) = 72). The research problem included the level (intensity) and gender-related differences in particular humor types (styles) across the juvenile sample. The research tool involved an adaption of the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). The findings suggest a greater intensity of adaptive rather than non-adaptive humor styles in both studied subsets of the sample. Furthermore, a statistically significant gender-related difference was found for self-defeating humor, with significantly higher scores in girls than in boys (p < 0.05). Although the findings do not confirm the research hypotheses conclusively, they shed light on the viability of using humor in juvenile rehabilitation and thus, encourage further systematic research in this area.