The Construction and Validation of the SP-IE Questionnaire: An Instrument for Measuring Spatial Presence in Immersive Environments

Abstract

The present study describes the construction and validation of an instrument for measuring spatial presence (the sense of “being there”) in the context of highly immersive environments: the SP-IE [Spatial Presence for Immersive Environments] questionnaire, for use in the French-speaking community. A first raw version of the questionnaire was submitted to an item selection procedure and reliability tests with 67 participants. An exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with 179 participants was then employed on the resulting version to explore its underlying scales. Finally, the outcome scale-structure from the EFA was evaluated using confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs). This process resulted in a well-structured 20-item questionnaire (link), based on seven scales: (i) the sense of spatial presence, (ii) the affordance of the environment, (iii) the user’s enjoyment, (iv) the user’s attention allocation to the task, (v) the sense of reality attributed to the environment, (vi) the social embodiment with avatars, and (vii) the possible negative effects of the environment (cybersickness). Results showed overall good internal consistency and satisfactory convergent validity of the scales. The fit indexes obtained (X2/df = 1.34, GFI =.95, CFI =.90, TLI =.87, SRMR =.068, and RSMEA =.045) demonstrated a good fitness of the structure proposed. However, even though the scale structure proposed in this paper was confirmed, its low discriminant validity encourages further evaluations.