Reconceptualizing Narrative Absorption as Reading Engagement: A Validation Study

The current study's purpose was to validate a revised Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS; Kuijpers et al., 2014) as a measure of habitual adolescent reading engagement. This approach to measuring reading engagement reflects the multidimensionality and theoretical alignment that is currently missing from the reading engagement literature. Furthermore, the revised SWAS assessed students' habitual and recreational reading of narrative texts. This is a novel approach because, despite empirical evidence that the frequency of reading fiction and/or narrative texts has a unique positive relationship with narrative and informational reading comprehension (Duncan et al., 2016; Mar & Rain, 2015), education research studies rarely focus on students' recreational reading of narrative texts. After revising the original SWAS to make it appropriate for an adolescent audience and reorient it as a habitual/trait measure instead of a situated/state measure, I conducted cognitive interviews, an exploratory factor analysis, and correlational analyses to gather validity evidence. Through American Educational Research Association (AERA) et al.'s (2014) validity framework, I evaluated this evidence for validity based on response processes, internal structure, and relations with other variables. The revised SWAS included the same dimensions as the original SWAS, specifically attention, emotional engagement, mental imagery, and transportation. Results showed support for the interpretation of the revised SWAS total score and its subscales' scores as indicators of adolescent reading engagement. This measure can and should be used in future research to investigate and understand adolescents' narrative reading engagement. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]