Measuring identification with narrative characters: the development and validation of a new scale

Abstract

During narrative reception, one psychological response audiences may experience toward story characters is identification, which involves a sense of merging between self and character. Given the lack of formally validated measures of this construct in the literature, the current paper introduces a new 12-item scale for measuring identification. Scale development and validation took place over three sequential studies. Exploratory factor analysis in Study 1 (N = 224) indicated four related factors: merging, perspective-taking, understanding, and emotional involvement. In Study 2 (N = 191), confirmatory factor analysis suggested that a second-order four-factor model provided a good fit to the data and a more parsimonious explanation of the scale’s factor structure compared to a first-order model. In addition, the overall scale and subscales demonstrated adequate internal consistency and correlated in the expected directions with theoretically relevant and irrelevant constructs. Using a more demographically diverse sample, Study 3 (N = 290) established measurement invariance of the scale across two narratives in terms of configural, metric, and partial scalar invariance, and provided further support for its factor structure, reliability, and validity.