This scale measures the one-sided emotional bond consumers form with media figures (e.g., social media influencers) in modern online environments, reconceptualizing parasocial relationship (PSR) for contexts existing scales built for offline/broadcast media fail to capture. It distinguishes three facets: how emotionally close and familiar the figure feels, how motivated the consumer is to keep engaging with them, and whether the consumer wants the relationship to extend into an actual real-life encounter or friendship. The instrument was developed across five studies and outperformed the two most-cited prior PSR scales (Rubin et al., 1985; Rubin & Perse, 1987) on convergent validity and predictive power for brand attitude and purchase intention, in both online and offline comparison contexts.
7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree)
Intimacy
Relationship Maintenance
Real-Life Relationship Intention
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
Reliability was assessed across three CFA studies. Study 4 (initial validation): Intimacy alpha=.81/CR=.81/AVE=.58; Relationship Maintenance alpha=.80/CR=.80/AVE=.57; Real-Life Relationship Intention alpha=.82/CR=.83/AVE=.71. Study 5 (test-retest sample): Intimacy alpha=.75/CR=.76/AVE=.51; Relationship Maintenance alpha=.77/CR=.78/AVE=.55; Real-Life Relationship Intention alpha=.89/CR=.89/AVE=.80 -- Intimacy and Relationship Maintenance dip modestly below .80 in this smaller sample. Study 6 (final cross-context validation, online): composite alpha=.89, CR range .81-.89, AVE range .58-.81. Test-retest correlations across the 8 items ranged from r=.37 to r=.78 (all p<.001) over the gap between Studies 4 and 5. The scale is explicitly compared against and outperforms the Parasocial Interaction Scale (Rubin, Perse & Powell, 1985) and the Rubin & Perse (1987) scale on factor loadings, reliability, AVE, and predictive validity for brand attitude and purchase intention, in both online and offline contexts.
Sheng, J., Kostyk, A. and Chatzipanagiotou, K. (2026). Parasocial relationship: reconceptualization, scale development and validation. Journal of Business Research, 210, 116122.
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