Development of the Musical Meaning Scale – EFA

This is an exploratory study to determine preliminary dimensionality of a new scale to capture how people attribute meaning to music during listening situations. Dimensionality will be explored using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). We also plan to investigate the difference between two experimental conditions, a) participants will respond to items three times to different vignettes and b) participants will respond to the items once and only be given one vignette. This study is a part of a larger project to develop a modular instrument for capturing emotional episodes with music (Kirts et al., 2026). The overarching theory postulates that descriptive schemes further describe and differentiate between emotional experiences people experience (Eerola et al., 2024). For the interests of this study, the descriptive scheme being explored is described as musical meaning. Thompson and colleagues (2023) proposed a descriptive framework encompassing three broad forms of musical appreciation which describe how and why a person may find music meaningful during a particular situation. These three forms reflect a) internalising the musical structure, b) personally significant associations, and c) interacting with the source or the causes and contexts of music making. Following an evaluation of content proposed to capture constructs representative of these concepts, 21 items were identified as being sufficient indicators by subject matter experts (Kirts et al., 2026). The purpose of the present EFA study is to investigate whether the hypothesised structure is supported by empirical data.