Measuring Narrative Engagement

“There are four dimensions of narrative engagement: narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence, re fl ecting the process as a multi-dimensional construct (Busselle and Bilandzic, 2009).”

“In doing so, the characters that lead this narrative flow should be sufficiently empathized by the players (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“A number of theorists note the usefulness of DST in relation to immersion, particularly in terms of conceptualising perspective taking (e.g. Busselle & Bilandzic 2009: 323) and/or projection into storyworlds (Herman 2002: 14-15, 271-74).”

“Busselle and Bilandzic (2009) also add two features in their definition of engagement: narrative understanding (i.e., comprehension) and narrative presence (i.e., “being there”).”

“Creating and updating mental models depends on the extent to which incoming story information can be incorporated into the person’s existing knowledge (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Gerrig & Mumper, 2017; Green, 2004).”

“The 18 participants who reported on measures of physical/emotional/narrative presence in the game [31] gave mixed reviews on the game.”

“Identification, thus, is a phenomenological experience where the audience member simulates the characters’ perspectives, adopts their goals and objectives, and becomes invested in their successes and failure (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Cohen, 2001; Oatley, 1995).”

“Furthermore, pro-social emotions toward others and enhanced empathy for fictional characters have been linked to higher delta activity [38,56], whereas a range of behavioral and affective characteristics, as well as high-level processes like sustained attention, inhibition, and cognitive control,…”

“The emotional engagement questionnaire was adopted from Busselle and Bilandzic (2009), and aims to assess the level of children’s engagement, emotions, or immersion in the storyteller’s narrative in different health education activities.”

“The measurement of participants’ transportation into a story was highly correlated with the enjoyment that was experienced during attending to it (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Green et al., 2004).”

“Similarly, narrative engagement also emphasizes the attentional focus dimension, which describes how individuals attend to the narrative and are not distracted by thoughts unrelated to the narrative (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“Narrative engagement has four dimensions, they argue: narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“[5] combine terminologies from both sides in devising a quantitative rating scale for narrative engagement, which include factors such as narrative presence and emotional engagement.”

“It derives from the way in which citizen imagery can transport (Green and Brock, 2002) viewers to the depicted setting, invite viewers to sense the depicted world as immediate (Busselle and Bilandzic, 2009: 325).”

“Overall, the experimental group’s active engagement in reading and higher reading volume showed a significant advantage in language comprehension ability [37].”

“This is a well-established scale developed by [15], used in many past works such as [44, 62, 77, 104], and can be combined into a measure of overall engagement or divided into subscales that distinguish among different aspects of engagement.”

“…to examine the effect of tweets about fake news on any number of persuasive processes, we chose narrative persuasion because the process is likely at play in any news accounts that encourage transportation into (Green & Brock, 2000) or engagement with (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009) a narrative.”

“[21] R. Busselle and H. Bilandzic, “Measuring Narrative Engagement,” Media Psychol., vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 321– 347, Nov. 2009.”

“…Keen, 2006), identification with characters (seeing oneself as similar to them, taking on their perspectives; e.g., Mar, Oatley, Djikic, & Mullin, 2011), and absorption (also called “transportation,” feeling immersed in the narrative world; e.g., Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Green & Brock, 2000).”

“Consequently, emotional engagement is closely related to recipients’ identification with characters (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Cohen, 2001).”

“Busselle and Bilandzic (2009) define the experience of narration as a multidimensional construct called ‘‘narrative engagement,’’ which includes narrative understanding and presence as well as attentional and emotional components.”

“…I was reading the narrative, I could easily picture the events in it taking place” (transportation scale, in Green & Brock, 2000) and “at points, I had a hard time making sense of what was going on in the program” (reversed item from narrative engagement scale, in Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“For example, models and measures of narrative engagement (e.g., Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009) could help explain social movements and the new formation of organizations such as the Occupy movement or #metoo followership and predict the impact of such digitally infused organizations on public debate,…”

“…on persuasive messages embedded in narratives from the examination of common behavioral correlates, such as story-consistent attitudes and beliefs (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Green, 2004; Green & Brock, 2000; Slater & Rouner, 2002), to consideration of an important, additional mechanism that…”

“The studies by Shen et al. (2014) and Oliver et al. (2012) used engagement and empathy as distinct measures, while conceptualizations of engagement often include empathy as a specific dimension of engagement (e.g., Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Slater & Rouner, 2002).”

“Whereas [45] uses GEQ[46], NEQ[47], and NTQ[48] to create a specialised UX questionnaire.”

“The four different dimensions represent different engagement processes (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“Transportation involves attentional focus, narrative presence (viewing the world of the story as real), narrative understanding, and emotional engagement (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“As such, acceptance of the narrative content becomes the default outcome (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Gerrig, 1993; Green & Brock, 2000).”

“To assess these perceptions, we included three evaluations of the videos at the end of the survey: a multi-item scale assessing narrative engagement (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; as¼ .79–.85), a single item asking how well the characters were developed, and perceived experimenter demand to rate…”

“The four-item marker version of Busselle and Bilandzic’s (2009) narrative engagement scale was used to measure transportation into the movie (1 = “does not apply at all”, 7 = “fully applies”; Cronbach’s alpha = .”

“…that addressed how engrossed students were in the story, whether students found the narrative confusing or easy to follow, and how convincing each narrative was relative to story and overall theme (table 2) as well as how difficult overall they found the text (Buselle and Bilandzic 2009).”

“This attentional focus is critical to the viewer’s ability to focus on the narrative (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“This was followed by the Narrative Engagement Scale (NES) [8], a scale that measures the participant’s immersion in the story and that consists of four subscales: narrative understanding, attentional focus, narrative presence, and emotional engagement.”

“According to (Busselle and Bilandzic 2009), it is possible to identify three mental models, all relevant for understanding a story: the situation model, which includes the story itself (plot) and all the connections between the actions and events of the story (the causal link); the character…”

“The post-survey contained the same questions as the pre-survey plus the Narrative Engagement Scale [9].”

“Although transportation has been conceptualized to entail attentional, cognitive, and emotional responses (Busselle and Bilandzic 2009; Green and Brock 2000), which of these factors is most crucial for brand placement effects still needs to be tested.”

“Additionally, we will ask physicians who use Night Shift to complete the Narrative Engagement Scale developed and validated by Busselle and Bilandzic [28].”

“The questionnaire adapted and combined questions from tools that have been shown to accurately measure immersion in gaming [4] and narrative engagement [2].”

“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].”

“The 3 items measured “ perceived medical narrativity ” were inspired from the scales used by Ma (2023) and Busselle and Bilandzic (2009).”

“In the transportation literature, researchers suggested that users may divert attention from the world they were previously immersed in when responses violate their expectations (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“The research was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by The University of Bath Department of Psychology Research Ethics Committee (20-202).”

“Proponents of the “affective assumption” have suggested that narratives generate an emotional involvement with characters (Slater and Rouner, 2002; Green et al., 2004; Busselle and Bilandzic, 2009) and that it is the emotional response to others’ needs that produces the “other-oriented desire” to reduce perceived dist…”

“Engagement is broadly defined as a psychological status where users feel deeply involved in a given task (O’Brien et al., 2018) or mediated content (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“Narrative absorption, a concept closely related to “transportation” (Green et al., 2004), “narrative engagement” (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009), and “identification” (Tal-Or & Cohen, 2010), is characterized by heightened sense of focused attention, transportation into the fictional world, emotional…”

“The Narrative Theory supports the use of storytelling as an organic way in which humans naturally process and assign value to information, especially when it is presented by someone who resembles the listener [39-42].”

“Moreover, the recipients may be more involved as firsthand personal information eases the process of taking on the exemplar’s perspective and fosters greater sympathy and empathy with the exemplar (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Cohen, 2001).”

“Where needed, participant quotes were edited for clarity and conciseness.”

“Engagement (ENG) assesses the ability of a story to captivate and maintain the reader’s attentional focus (Busselle and Bilandzic, 2009).”

“It is believed that the distinctive processing of narrative persuasion lies in the involvement in the story world with heightened imagery, emotional, and cognitive experiences (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Tal-Or & Cohen, 2010; Tukachinsky & Tokunaga, 2013).”

“In terms of narrative engagement, which is concerned with how immersed the user is in the progression of events during a media experience [7], Nordin et al.”

“Hypothesis/Research Questions Viewers’ engagement with visual media, including narrative understanding, focus and emotional connection, are correlated with transportation levels (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009).”

“This scale assesses the extent to which a participant becomes engaged, transported, or immersed in storytellers’ narratives (11).”

“Our results confirm what was found previously with respect to the importance of emotions for immersion, or transportation [33][34].”

“Self-reported sympathy is often confused with empathy because of a few relevant – but ambiguous – colloquial expressions (e.g., “feeling for”; Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009, p. 331), but it also can be confused with “pity,” which is more clearly reactive.”

“Finally, narrative involvement was also measured with an index from past work (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009), with sample items including “I was mentally involved in the story while viewing,” “the viewing experience was intense for me,” and “I was never really pulled into the story” (Cronbach’s alpha…”

“However, prior solutions did not utilize the capabilities of generative AI, which can offer real-time feedback during storytelling, enabling users to reflect on their non-cognitive skills.”

“For example, in studying mental health stigma, Kim and Stout (2010) found that when participants could control message sequence in reading a narrative, they were able to comprehend the story better, which is a proxy of more narrative engagement (see Busselle and Bilandzic 2009).”

“…1931-3896 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000356 1 In addition to its central role in narrative enjoyment (Bartsch, 2012; Plantinga, 2009; Tan, 2008), empathy has also been established as an essential aspect of various narrative processes and responses (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009; Coplan, 2008).”

“Narrative Engagement[27] is based on four different processes: narrative understanding (i.e., cognitive perspective taking and making sense of the story), attentional focus (i.e., undivided attention for the story), emotional engagement (i.e., empathy for the characters) and narrative presence (i.e., the sensation of…”

“Busselle and Bilandzic (2009) propose that this process of keeping pace with narrative information sustains the transportive experience.”

“Among these mechanisms that can increase or influence engagement is perspective-taking (i.e. when an individual sees an event from the perspective of a character) (Busselle and Bilandzic, 2009).”

“While narrative engagement is focused more on the mental aspect of being immersed in the unfolding of events, we assume that it was affected similarly with presence due to factors pertaining to the self that both measures share [40].”

“To measure the participants’ engagement in the storytelling design in the experiences, we adopted and modifed a narrative engagement questionnaire (NEQ) that was proposed by Busselle and Bilandzic [21].”

“Involvement with the story has also been referred to as transportation (Green & Brock, 2000), narrative engagement (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009), and absorption (Slater & Rouner, 2002).”