Title: Engagement and mobile listening

Authors: María T. Soto-Sanfiel

Addresses: Departament de Comunicació Audiovisual i Publicitat, Centre d'Intel.ligència Ambiental de Catalunya, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Edifici I. Bellaterra 08193, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: This research explores the effect of mobile listening on factors that have been proposed to determine enjoyment of audiovisual fictions: identification with characters, perceived realism, presence and transportation. A quasi-experimental research with 2 × 2 factorial design where the independent variables were listening condition (moving and stationary) and two different horror audio narratives (s1 and s2) was conducted. Main results show that mobile listening reduces identification, attention, narrative realism, spatial situation perception and cognitive involvement. Results also show that mobile listening does not diminish enjoyment of these narratives, which turns out to be predicted by narrative realism, empathetic-absorbent-behavioural identification, attention, high cognitive involvement and specific terrain of interest. The study also validates the scales for measuring the factors of engagement, which were originally proposed in the context of audiovisual narratives, for audio fictions.

Keywords: audience engagement; mobile listening; mobile reception; mobile audience; mobile consumption; mobile radio; mobile audio; character identification; perceived realism; spatial presence; transport; audience enjoyment; audio fictions; mobility; mobile communications; horror fiction; audio narratives; attention; narrative realism; spatial situation perception; cognitive involvement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMC.2015.065889

International Journal of Mobile Communications, 2015 Vol.13 No.1, pp.29 - 50

Received: 12 Jan 2013
Accepted: 18 Sep 2013
Published online: 29 Nov 2014 *

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