“Fun, Fun, Fun”: Types of Fun, Attitudes to Fun, and their Relation to Personality and Biographical Factors

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.