In Search of Entertainment-Education’s Effects on Attitudes and Behaviors

Abstract

This chapter describes my journey through a series of research projects that sought to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of entertainment-education in different contexts. In study after study, I find enduring effects concerning the specific norms or behaviors that are modeled in video or radio dramas, but I seldom see transformative effects whereby audience members change their general outlook. For example, dramatizations that call attention to the tragic consequences of violence against women do change audience members’ willingness to help victims and to report incidents to local leaders, but they do not change overarching views about whether husbands have a right to beat their wives or whether wife-beating should be against the law. Either we need to redouble our research and development efforts to craft transformative entertainment-education through systematic testing or resign ourselves to making the most of the incremental gains that are typical of this kind of social intervention.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.