Measuring Narrative Engagement

Abstract

Research indicates that the extent to which one becomes engaged, transported, or immersed in a narrative influences the narrative's potential to affect subsequent story-related attitudes and beliefs. Explaining narrative effects and understanding the mechanisms responsible depends on our ability to measure narrative engagement in a theoretically meaningful way. This article develops a scale for measuring narrative engagement that is based on a mental models approach to narrative processing. It distinguishes among four dimensions of experiential engagement in narratives: narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence. The scale is developed and validated through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with data from viewers of feature film and television, in different viewing situations, and from two different countries. The scale's ability to predict enjoyment and story-consistent attitudes across different programs is presented. Implications for conceptualizing engagement with narratives as well as narrative persuasion and media effects are discussed.

Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

“…The potency of stories to change a recipient’s worldview and his or her attitudes has been attributed to the situational state of being transported into the story world ( transportation ; Gerrig, 1993; Green & Brock, 2000; or narrative engagement ; Busselle & Bilandzic, 2008, 2009). The term transportation is based on the metaphor that recipients undertake a mental journey when reading a book or watching a movie.…”

“…The more recipients are transported into the story world, the more their cognitive and emotional processing is focused on the story world and the less their processing is focused on the immediate surroundings (such as the room in which a story is read) or other information that is unconnected to the story (such as an upcoming sports event). As recently pointed out by Bezdek and Gerrig (2016), the self-report scales used to measure transportation (such as the Transportation Scale; Green & Brock, 2000) include items on attentional focus (e.g., “While I was reading the narrative, activity going on in the room was on my mind,” reverse coded; see also the narrative engagement scale by Busselle & Bilandzic [2009], which includes an attentional focus subscale).…”

“…Rich imagination likely consumes cognitive resources or working memory resources that are not available for competing simultaneous cognitive tasks (Green & Brock, 2002). Thus, being transported into the story world is supposed to be incompatible with demanding cognitive-elaborative activities such as counterarguing (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Dal Cin et al, 2004; Green & Brock, 2000; Slater & Rouner, 2002), which is known as a key obstacle to persuasive efforts (e.g., Brock, 1967; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Drawn into the story world, recipients might lack sufficient working memory resources to engage in a thorough analysis of the communication.…”

Emotional Gratification in Entertainment Experience. Why Viewers of Movies and Television Series Find it Rewarding to Experience Emotions

“…Concepts such as transportation (Green & Brock, 2000), involvement (Vorderer, 1993), identification (Cohen, 2006), and narrative engagement (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009) have dealt with the gratification of making vicarious experiences.…”

Distributed Drama Management: Beyond Double Appraisal in Emergent Narrative

“…For user evaluation, we are interested in whether participating in a narrative experience using DDM has any effect on engagement with the story, using models of engagement such as that described by Busselle and Bilandzic [20]. For author evaluation, we are interested in whether, by providing some very high-level control over the course of the story, it is easier to define a scenario for DDM than for Double Appraisal.…”