Narrative Engagement

A multidimensional construct used in media studies and HCI research to capture how deeply a viewer is drawn into a story, including narrative understanding, attentional focus, narrative presence (the feeling of being inside the story world), and emotional engagement with characters. Most commonly measured via Busselle and Bilandzic's 12-item scale. In accessibility research, narrative engagement is used to evaluate whether enhancements such as affective captions, audio description, or multimodal feedback actually improve a viewer's experience of audio-visual content rather than merely adding information.