TRANSPORTATION SCALE 1 The Transportation Scale - Short Form (TS-SF) Markus Appel University of Koblenz-Landau Timo Gnambs Osnabrück University Tobias Richter University of Kassel Melanie Green State University of New York at Buffalo Accepted for publication in Media Psychology Author Note Markus Appel, Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. Timo Gnambs, Institute of Psychology, Osnabrück University, Germany. Tobias Richter, Department of Psychology, University of Kassel, Germany. Melanie Green, Department of Communication, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA. This work was supported by grants from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, I 996- G22) and the German Science Foundation (DFG, RI 1100/8-1) awarded to Markus Appel and Tobias Richter. We thank Barbara Malečkar for her support in conducting Study 1. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Markus Appel, Department of Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Fortstr. 7, 78629 Landau, Germany. E-mail:
[email protected] TRANSPORTATION SCALE 2 Abstract One popular concept to capture the experience of being immersed into the world of a story is the concept of transportation. This paper examines the factorial validity of the Transportation Scale (TS) and introduces a short and psychometrically sound alternative for the assessment of transportation. Exploratory bifactor modeling in Study 1 (N = 179) provided support for the hypothesized factor structure of the original TS with three facets and a general transportation factor. Based on these analyses, a six-item short version of the scale, the Transportation Scale- Short Form (TS-SF), was developed. Study 2 (N = 131 and N = 246) as well as Study 3 (N = 301) corroborated the short form’s factorial structure, reliability, and validity.