Abstract

Narrative engagement is a fundamental factor in understanding the enjoyment of narratives and their effects. This study seeks to develop a measure of engagement for youngsters and to gather evidence of validity and reliability for a sample of European adolescents. After watching a dramatic film, 310 European high school students (68.71% Italian, 17.74% Spanish and 13.55% German) responded to the proposed narrative engagement scale. The results confirmed the existence of a common factorial model of four factors for Germans and Italians and invariance measurement between samples. The mean score comparison shows that German adolescents have a greater understanding of the narrative than Italians. Also, Germans demonstrated greater emotional understanding than Spaniards. These results contribute to the comprehension of the narrative engagement and illuminate the conceptualization of the psychological phenomena related to the reception of dramatic narratives by youngsters of different cultures across Europe.