Investigating the Exchanged Jokes among the Secondary School Female Students regarding their Correspondence with the Educational Goals

Sense of humor is one of the teenager's needs manifested in many forms including telling jokes. Encountering with jokes creates some experiences for students that are researchable in hidden curriculum. In this study carried out via content analysis method, the participants (1713 girls from 6 secondary schools in Mashhad) were asked to write the three of the latest jokes they had heard from their classmates and submitthem to the researchers. Accordingly, 5162 jokes were analyzed through inductive and deductive methods. The categories in the deductive analysis were derived from the educational goals for the secondary school students including ideological, ethical, social and political issues. In the current research, the correspondence or lack of correspondence of these jokes with the stated goals were examined. The categories in the inductive analysis were also discovered after reading the half of jokes by the researches. Inorder to determine the validity of the data, a second person was asked to code 10 % of the data. The degree of the agreement between the two stages of coding was 0/83. The findings of the study revealed that the content of the jokes did not correspond to the educational goals for the secondary school students.