The Development of a Multidimensional Engagement Measure

Abstract

Over the past decades, user engagement has become central to product success more than ever before. However, while engagement has been studied extensively in various disciplines, these bodies of knowledge are siloed. One indication of this separation is that there is no existing user engagement measure that can be used consistently and reliably across research domains. This emergent research paper aims to progress towards bridging this gap by developing an engagement scale that may be generalized to multiple disciplines. To that effect, we first identified engagement as a three dimensional phenomenon and developed definitions for each dimension. Next, we conducted a series of four studies to develop and validate a measure of user engagement. This resulted in a 16-item measure to assess cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement. Future steps include further refinement of the measure, and additional studies to test the generalizability of the scale across disciplines.