Vignettes and Their Role in Bullying Research

Transportation is the concept that readers become engaged when they read a story. The level of transportedness may impact the emotional response of the reader. Research shows that stories can be used to transport readers but there is a failure to identify vignettes as a viable medium. The ability of vignettes, a brief narrative without a conclusion, to transport readers is unknown. The purpose of this study is to determine if vignettes can be used to transport readers into a narrative and also to explore the link between transportation and negative affect. Each participant was presented 11 bullying vignettes sequentially and were asked to respond to the Transportation Scale and the Negative Affect Scale. Descriptive and inferential analysis were performed. The results showed that readers were transported into the bullying vignettes and that there is a slight positive correlation between transportation and negative emotions (r=.339).