Hardly any other term was and is as widespread in the research tradition of communication science across almost all sub-disciplines as involvement. For almost every reception situation, an area of application seems immediately conceivable: Consider the highly involved reception of a movie due to personal genre preferences, next to which the involved reception of a commercial promoting a product irrelevant to the individual is very low. For politically interested people, it is an absolute must to watch talk shows in the run-up to elections and to get heavily involved in them, while their possibly rather disinterested partners might sit next to them bored and without any visible emotions. The brochure of an educational organization on health issues is likely to be read by such people involved, who recognize themselves in certain symptoms and then reach directly for their smartphone to research further information. This list could be continued at will – but even now, an unpleasant feeling of conceptual ambiguity creeps in. The term “involved” in the above examples already includes cognitive, affective, and conative processes that have reference points before, during, and after the reception of the media, without really being delimited from one another.

Therefore, it is not surprising that already in the 1980s the lack of a uniform definition and conceptualization as well as inconsistent operationalization was criticized (e.g., Antil, 1984; Salmon, 1986) and voices were raised that even began to question the usefulness of such a meta-concept: “A concept that includes cognitive responses, felt emotions, attention, recall, information seeking, and discussions about the topic is not very useful. If involvement were all-encompassing, we could easily abandon the concept” (Wirth, 2006, pp. 209–210). While the frequency of use of the concept of involvement may indeed have declined somewhat in some areas of communication research in the years that followed, an analysis in the field of advertising research, for example, nevertheless shows a high prevalence of its use in published studies in the field between 2006 and 2019 (Naderer and Matthes, 2019). The authors concur with the critical conclusion of Wirth (2006), which at that time was still in the subjunctive, and, given the variety of meanings united under the umbrella term of involvement in their analysis, increase this skepticism to a call for an end to the use of the concept. In contrast, however, is the still ongoing integration of involvement chapters into the field’s textbooks and handbooks, which either strive for conceptual delineation (e.g., Bilandzic and Busselle, 2017; Bilandzic et al., 2015) or seek to gather related popular constructs of media reception research under the umbrella concept involvement (e.g., Tukachinsky and O’Connor, 2017).

The central question that arises from this will also form the core of this article: Is there a need for such a meta-concept, which, depending on the interpretation, combines many explanatory approaches and closely related concepts? Or is it not rather worthwhile to differentiate these concepts analytically in order to thereby increase the explanatory value of the various concepts and thus also of the original concept? In order to answer these questions, the historical development of the concept from its origins to its current use in numerous subdisciplines of communication science will be traced in order to then take a closer and comparative look at three different central understanding and concepts of involvement¹ – ego-involvement as the original concept of involvement (Sherif and Cantril, 1947; Sherif and Sargent, 1947), personal relevance as central concept of high involvement in information processing (Petty et al., 1981; Zaichkowsky, 1985), and resonance as an involved mode of reception (Rosa, 2016, 2018; Vorderer, 2021). In the final conclusion and outlook, the three concepts are finally related to each other more closely, overlaps and differences are made clear, and we come to the conclusion that the original concept of involvement still has its raison d’être and that communication science research should take this fact more into account when designing its studies.

The original conception of Sherif and colleagues (Sherif and Cantril, 1947; Sherif and Sargent, 1947) envisages a so-called ego-involvement as a relevant variable for understanding the reception and effect of mass media. According to this, a person’s ego consists of so-called “ego-attitudes” (Sherif and Sargent, 1947, p. 10), which represent the (never completed) result of a person’s (social) development and characterize a person’s relationship to the environment. According to this, an involved ego has a great power of influence in the medial reception situation: “In short, when the ego is involved in any situation, in any capacity, our reactions are not impartial” (p. 10). From this perspective, it is possible to understand the importance attributed to the involvement construct in subsequent decades.

Also in the mass media context, but less from a social psychological perspective and more from the perspective of advertising research, Krugman (1965) devoted himself in the 1960s to a conception of involvement to explain the effect of television advertising. He emphasizes the difference to concepts like attention, interest or excitement and defines involvement rather as so-called “bridging experiences” (p. 355), in this sense connections and references, which are produced every minute by the person watching between his own life and the stimulus. The number of these references can range from none to many, which makes it possible to distinguish between low and high involvement. To this differentiation is added a distinction regarding the involvement with the medium (television vs. print magazine) and the object (high-involvement product vs. low-involvement product) (Krugman, 1966). Authors such as Batra and Ray (1983) later join a distinction between product and message involvement but take up mainly the latter aspect and thus see involvement as a situational state, characterized by the depth and quality of the cognitive (and in their understanding also affective) reaction to a message. Accordingly, involvement is the result of many situational and interacting factors and thus not a persistent disposition.

The involvement concept also gained great importance in the 1980s with its integration into the framework of classical two-process models of persuasion. Thus, within the framework of the Elaboration-Likelihood Model, which distinguishes between deep processing on a central route and superficial processing on a peripheral route, the construct was assigned the status of a motivational variable in the sense of personal relevance (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). The heuristic-systematic model distinguishes between systematic information processing associated with high cognitive effort and heuristic information processing associated with low cognitive effort (Chaiken, 1980). According to this model, high involvement occurs when the topics of a message are personally important to someone or when one’s own opinion to these topics is perceived as having important consequences for oneself or others.

Over the years, the involvement concept has been expanded piece by piece by different research disciplines. According to Johnson and Eagly (1989), involvement is a specific motivational state that results from a connection between an activated attitude and the self-concept. Accordingly, three aspects of self-concept can be distinguished in the influence of involvement on persuasion processes: A person’s enduring values, a person’s ability to achieve desired goals, and the impression a person makes on others. Depending on which of these aspects is activated, the three different types of involvement emerge: value-relevant, outcome-relevant, and impression-relevant, each with its own impact (see the meta-analysis by Johnson and Eagly, 1989). In the context of political communication, Rothschild and Ray (1974) added a distinction between cognitive, affective, and conative involvement to the distinction between different strengths of involvement, which has since been made by many authors (for an overview, see, e.g., Wirth, 2006, pp. 203–204). Salmon (1986), on the other hand, arranges findings of involvement along a continuum by means of four categories: At one end, involvement is understood as a personality trait, while at the other end it is assumed to be a stimulus property. In between lies the assumption that involvement arises from the interaction of the individual and the stimulus, with the internal state of the person playing the greater role in one case and the salience of a stimulus in the other. Levy and Windahl (1985) relate involvement to the different phases of media reception in their conceptualization of audience activity: Involvement can occur before reception (in the sense of anticipation), during reception (in the sense of attention or parasocial interaction), and after reception (in the sense of long-term identification).

In answer to the question to what extent these exemplary selections of conceptualizations are compatible with each other – or, more importantly, should be integrated with each other at all – different approaches can be found on a theoretical level: Zaichkowsky (1986), for example, combines many of the considerations in the advertising context into an inclusive model: Involvement includes the ego aspects according to Sherif and Cantril (1947) and is motivational in nature, leading to higher attention, perceived importance and corresponding behavior. Specifically, in Zaichkowsky’s understanding, personal factors (such as needs and values), stimulus factors (such as the source and content of the communication), and situational factors (such as the purchase and the opportunity) can be identified as causal for a person’s involvement. Involvement itself thus takes place at the levels of advertising, product, and purchase decision, and has a variety of consequences (such as the generation of counterarguments, preference for a particular brand, or the extent of information seeking). In contrast, approaches such as that of Bilandzic et al. (2015, p. 79) argue for a narrower understanding of involvement in order to be able to explain phenomena of reception and effect in a targeted and consistent manner in the first place. In this context, reference is made to the definition according to Donnerstag (1996, p. 31), who first states that the concept of involvement can describe a personality trait, an internal state, or situational influences, depending on the conceptualization. As a consequence, ego-involvement is narrowed down as a paraphrase for the internal commitment that people devote to a situation, topic or task to varying degrees (p. 30).

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that even within supposedly well-defined subdisciplines of communication science, there is still a clear heterogeneity in the understanding of the term, as an exemplary look at studies in the field shows: In health communication, involvement is understood on the one hand as the personal relevance of a topic (Aldoory, 2001), whereas on the other hand, parasocial and identification processes are summarized (Myrick, 2019). Elsewhere, we speak of structural features of the medium that allow a certain degree of control and require a certain type of cognitive processing (Engelberg et al., 1995). In the field of entertainment research, multidimensional operationalizations can be found, such as Hall (2009) breakdown into social, cognitive, and online involvement. In a study by Liebes and Katz (1986), on the other hand, involvement is understood as a kind of four-dimensional antithesis to detachment from the program, while Vorderer (1993) contrasts the involved, emotionally and cognitively immersive mode of reception with an analytical one. Research in the field of advertising communication is based on the one hand on the already discussed product involvement (Quester and Lim, 2003), on the other hand on the involvement with the program context in situational and cross-situational form (Tsiotsou, 2013) or investigates factors that increase the involvement with the message (Muehling et al., 1990). In political communication, for example, involvement is conceived as a multifaceted construct of knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors (Aarts and Semetko, 2003), a motivational component based on personal relevance (Heath and Douglas, 1990), or a relevance-based situational level of interest (Kushin and Yamamoto, 2010).

In summary, this small selection of theoretical conceptualizations and empirical examples already shows that the original social psychological ego-involvement has been enriched over time with processes relevant to other subdisciplines. Partly, these can now be explained more comprehensively by other established communication science and media psychology concepts (e.g., interpersonal involvement in the context of parasocial interactions, see, e.g., Hartmann et al., 2004; Klimmt et al., 2006), but partly the term involvement continues to be used for completely different concepts. The main problem seems to lie in understanding the persistence of involvement in the different concepts (cf. Naderer and Matthes, 2019; Wirth, 2006). The explanations of the different conceptualizations have shown: While on the one hand involvement is defined as a situation-independent person characteristic (Sherif and Cantril, 1947; Sherif and Hovland, 1961), other researchers (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986; Zaichkowsky, 1986) understand involvement as an influence factor activated by a media reception situation in the framework of two-process models. Additionally, understandings of involvement can also be found (Lombard and Ditton, 1997; Suckfüll, 2004; Vorderer, 2021) in which a specific mode of reception is described during a media reception. In the following sections of this article, these three central understandings of involvement will therefore be distinguished from each other in order to finally be able to answer the question posed in the introduction.

Ego-involvement, personal relevance, resonance: the examination of these three different understandings of an involved experience has shown that the constructs certainly have commonalities: All three constructs describe a strong first-person reference to the topics, content, and messages of a media offering and are therefore able to explain individual peri- and post-receptive media effects. All three assume that this first-person reference is particularly powerful because it is accompanied by a feeling of importance and significance, and this feeling results in a more attentive, conscious, elaborate and sometimes even critical processing of media content and messages, especially when the content and messages contradict one’s own convictions.

However, there are also differences between the three constructs: In the case of ego-involvement, the causal ego-attitudes have been socialized or cultivated over a longer period of time and therefore shape a person’s identity and value framework. Ego-involvement should therefore be evident during media reception primarily when topics, content, and messages address a person’s central and stable identity and value aspects or even challenge them – and these are by no means all topics, content, and messages that may seem important and significant to a person, at least in certain phases and situations. The latter would rather be well met with the construct of personal relevance, because it also shows up when the topics, contents and messages seem important and significant to the person only temporarily or only in a single moment – and be it because one’s attention was drawn to something or even manipulated directly before the media reception (e.g., to focus on a supposedly quite significant movie scene). In the sense of personal relevance, recipients are also particularly involved, for example, if they know that the contents of a media offer will be queried or tested at a later point in time (e.g., in an entrance test or an exam), or if they know that the contents could be suitable for facilitating an upcoming decision (e.g., purchase of a product). Personal relevance can thus also show up in many cases in which the identity and the value framework of a person are not affected at all. The involved experience, which comes about due to personal relevance, is thus linked to fewer preconditions and should therefore be the normal case in everyday media reception, while the involved experience in the sense of ego-involvement should represent the exceptional case.

The construct of resonance makes the differentiation even more difficult: The understanding of resonance from cultivation research is out of line and does not serve any differentiation in the sense of this article, because there any content and any message that one has already encountered in real life can trigger a form of resonance through media reception, but it is not decisive whether the content and messages are considered important and significant by the recipients. More appropriate in terms of the concept of involvement discussed in this article is therefore Rosa (2018) and Vorderer (2021) understanding of resonance as a significant and sometimes even touching experience of people, objects, or topics. Resonance arises here only in the experience, i.e., in the concrete engagement with a media content – in this respect it differs from ego-involvement, as it is not present pre-receptively as a stable person characteristic. However, according to Rosa (2016), it arises on the basis of and as a consequence of one’s own experiences, attitudes, and sometimes even values, and, according to Vorderer (2021), is only experienced as truly meaningful and sense-giving as a result. This special experience during reception has a lot in common with the exceptional case of ego-involvement outlined above, which also takes personally important attitudes and values as a basis. Resonance could therefore be understood as a mode of reception that can come about on the basis of ego-involvement. However, if one wants to find differences between these two concepts in the reception phase, one could assume that resonance should still occur when the person, the topic, or the message particularly touches one, e.g., due to personally made experiences, but without affecting the central and longer socialized identity aspects. Something can also be significant and meaningful if the significance or meaning is only recognized at the moment of reception: For example, a person who increasingly suffers from loneliness in his or her life might only recognize the meaningfulness of friendships through a film. This would be explained very well by the resonance concept, less well by the ego-involvement concept.

The distinction between all three constructs becomes even clearer with another example: According to the understanding of ego-involvement, persons are strongly involved in environmental protection if they strongly associate their attitudes toward environmental protection with their values, i.e., they also identify themselves by the attitudes they have regarding environmental protection. Involvement is part of the person regardless of whether the person is currently confronted with the environmental issue, for example, by watching an environmental documentary. This kind of involvement can also be described by personal relevance. In addition, personal relevance provides the description of another state: The personal relevance of environmental protection according to Petty et al. (1981) describes a relevance that is only activated by media reception. A person might consider environmental protection as relevant only while watching an environmental documentary due to newly gained insights – even if the person had hardly any contact with the topic before or if the topic had not touched the person’s value framework before. Such a kind of media situation-specific involvement also describes resonance according to the understanding of Vorderer (2021). Resonance in the understanding of a eudaimonic entertainment experience describes an involved experience during an environmental documentary that occurs when the person is touched by contents of the documentary based on the person’s values and experiences and thus perceives the media reception as meaningful. These values and experiences would not even have to have a direct environmental reference or a high environmental awareness: The person could be touched, for example, because the fates of affected people are shown in the environmental documentary and this activates the person’s value for a life of human coexistence, but also, for example, because a region is shown in which the person may have already spent his or her vacation.

The following table summarizes the three concepts in terms of various aspects and criteria (Table 1).

All in all, it can thus be stated that personal relevance is easiest to establish or that it is not necessarily linked to pre-receptive conditions. Resonance in Rosa’s sense, on the other hand, requires personal experience gained prior to reception. Ego-involvement furthermore requires long-term socialization and identity formation. Personal relevance is thus the broadest concept, followed by resonance and ego-involvement. Consequently, an involved experience during media reception could always be measured with personal relevance. However, in cases where the involved experience has come about due to personal experiences or as a consequence of activated personal values and identity aspects, a relevance measurement would be too undifferentiated. As a result, the intensity of involvement, the type of involvement and any subsequent media effects could be explained less precisely. Even though the constructs can be intertwined, this article proposes a more differentiated approach. Researchers could reflect on this more in advance in future studies in order to select the appropriate concept and the appropriate measurement. What our reflections should have shown, however: The original concept of ego-involvement still has its raison d’être, because it offers its very own explanatory contribution to the processes of media reception.