Investigating the effect of narrative transportation on content and extent of written condolence letters in a WWII-context

To find out more about how narrative transportation works and about how condolence letters are written, the effect that narrative transportation has on the emotional content and extent of words written in condolence letters was investigated. This study uses a fictional scenario depicting an event from World War II. The research question was ‘To what extent does the level of narrative transportation influence the emotional content or the extent of the written letters?’ A total of 89 responses were recorded for the survey, of which 46 were usable. A correlational analysis was conducted between the scores on the Transportation Scale - Short Form and its subscales to the word count and the emotional content of condolence letters written. With an inter-coder agreement of alpha = .75, there was no significant effect found between narrative transportation and the emotional content (r (46) = .02, p = .92) or extent (r (46) =.13, p =.39) of the letters written. These results indicate that there is no relation between the two variables. If true, this could have huge implications on many fields. However, some limitations on the study will be discussed that may have impacted the results.