The development and validation of the Immersion Experience Questionnaire Short Form (IEQ-SF)

Digital games are a dominant form of entertainment and of increasing interest to HCI researchers. Unlike productivity applications, the chief outcome of a game is the experience it provides and one of the key aspects of that experience is the feeling of immersion. Immersion can be measured using the Immersion Experience Questionnaire (IEQ) (Jennett et al., 2008), however this scale was developed over 16 years ago using outdated methods and its length (31 items) makes it unsuited for studies which use multiple scales or recruitment platforms which charge by the minute. To address this, we used item response theory and open science practices to develop a new Immersion Experience Questionnaire Short Form (IEQ-SF). We performed a large-scale factor analysis and developed a candidate short-form with 11-items which represent the subfactors of Involvement, Real-World Dissociation and Challenge. This scale was then validated with four studies using a mix of existing data available through Open Science and a new validation study. The short-form was found to function very similarly to the original IEQ. We also provide best practice guidelines for development of short form scales, and through OSF, all analysis scripts and data used during this scale development.