STRIKING EXAMPLES OF PROSOCIAL MEDIA FROM AFRICA

STRIKING EXAMPLES OF PROSOCIAL MEDIA FROM AFRICA

A popular comic book and video character in Zambia and several other African countries is 12-year-old Sara, a girl whose adventures include outwitting her greedy uncle who tries to steal her school fees, rescuing a friend about to be sexually molested, escaping from older women attempting genital mutilation and making a smokeless cooking stove for

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her mother. The UNICEF-produced series has become very popular and provides a role model for empowering adolescent girls in societies that have not always valued education for girls (Bald, 1998).

After West African villagers in impoverished Sanankoroba, Mali, saw news on their battery-powered televisions of massive ice storm damage in Eastern Canada in January 1998, they took up a collection and sent about US$66 to their sister city of St.-Elisabeth, Quebec. Although the per capita income of St.-Elisabeth was about 75 times that of Sanankoroba, the Malians appreciated the Quebeckers’ donations to them after floods in 1995 and 1997 and cited the Malian proverb that “If you cannot share the meager resources you have today, you will not know how to part with a centime of the wealth you have tomorrow” (Friend in Need, 1998).

In another uplifting story from Mali, Malian singer Oumou Sangaré sings “More and more we live in a world ruled by individualism, a selfish world,” and “Let us fight for women’s literacy. Women, let us fight together for our freedom, so we can put an end to this social injustice.” Sangaré’s message combines traditional Malian music with a sort of blues style that is making her immensely popular worldwide and causing her traditional countrymen to seriously listen to a message they have long been closed to (Rothenberg, 1998).

Effects of E-E Programs

Evaluation research (W. J. Brown & Cody, 1991) found Hum Log’s impact to be complex and not always what was predicted. For example, many women viewers identified with Bhagwanti, the family matriarch and traditional woman, rather than with her more independent daughters Badki and Chutki, at least in part because of concern over the difficulties that the younger women’s more independent stance had brought to them. There is an interesting parallel between the effects of Hum Log and the 1970s U.S. sitcom All in the Family, where more traditional viewers identified with the bigoted Archie Bunker and found him to be a more positive figure than the producers had envisioned (Vidmar & Rokeach, 1974). This phenomenon of some viewers identifying with the intended negative role models has been observed in several nations and has come to be known as the “Archie Bunker effect,” so named after the lead character in All in the Family (Singhal & Rogers, 1999).

E-E campaigns have shown impressive effects, if well implemented. The basic entertainment function provides interesting characters with whom the public develops parasocial relationships (Papa et al., 2000; Sood, 2002). The narrative form may be an especially good format for placing persuasive

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messages (Slater & Rouner, 2002). A good E-E program can increase a viewer/listener’s sense of self-efficacy, one’s beliefs about one’s capabilities to exercise control over events that affect their lives (Bandura, 1997). These beliefs can then lead to prosocial behaviors like using condoms, seeking medical advice, or taking control over one’s reproductive health. It can also contribute to a sense of collective efficacy, the belief in joint capabilities to forge individual self-interests into a shared agenda (Bandura, 1995). For example, when viewers of a Soul City story on wife-battering gather in front of a neighborhood batterer’s home and bang their pans in censure, a behavior seen in the series, collective efficacy is achieved (Singhal & Rogers, 2002).

Conclusions . In considering the effectiveness of entertainment-education media in developing countries, Rogers and Singhal (1990; see also Singhal & Rogers, 1999, 2002) drew several conclusions:

1. Placing an educational message in an entertainment context can draw a mass audience and earn large profits, which thus support the prosocial campaign.

2. The educational message cannot be too blatant or hard sell or the audience will reject it.

3. The effect of the media message in such programs is enhanced by supplementary specific tips about behavior change.

4. The repetition of prosocial themes in a telenovela has a greater effect than a one-shot media PSA campaign. A continuing series like Soul City generally will have greater impact than a one-episode story on ER.

5. Prosocial campaigns are most successful if the media, government, commercial sponsors, and public health organizations work together. See Bouman (2002) for discussion of various management models for E-E campaigns.

Although no broad-based popular E-E campaigns have been promulgated in the United States, elements of E-E have appeared on American entertainment television on an occasional basis. Perhaps the earliest was the designated driver campaign of the later 1980s (Rosenzweig, 1999). Professor Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health worked with NBC and over 250 writers, producers, and TV executives over six months to try to incorporate what was then a new idea—the “designated driver”—into TV plot lines. By 1994, the designated driver message had appeared on 160 prime-time shows and had been the main topic of 25. Two-thirds of the public had noted the mention of designated drivers in TV shows and just over half of young adults reported they had served as a designated driver. By the late 1990s, the drunk-driving fatality rate had fallen by one-third from ten years earlier, in part almost surely due to greater use of designated

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drivers. Acceptance of this concept was due in part to a subtle entertainment- education campaign. See Box 11.9 for some additional recent examples.

BOX 11.9

PUBLIC HEALTH PRODUCT PLACEMENTS On Beverly Hills 90210 Steve brags about his flawless tan, but his

girlfriend notices a suspicious mole on the back of his neck. Concerned about skin cancer, he later took a megaphone to the beach and shouted about the benefits of using sunscreen. On ER Dr. Mark Greene, concerned about overuse of antibiotics and later brutally honest after his brain surgery walks into his hospital waiting room and tells the patients there not to expect antibiotics for the flu, after which half of them leave. Another episode of ER used a plot line about morning-after contraception; subsequent research showed that 6 million of the shows’

34 million viewers had learned about morning-after contraception from watching the show (Rosenzweig, 1999). The first two of these plot lines were written by, or with the cooperation of, the Center for Disease Control, which since 1998 has had an entertainment-education program to assist teleplay writers in placing positive health messages in their entertainment scripts of popular TV shows. Viewers do find the information from such shows helpful. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that one third of ER viewers reported learning something from the show that had been helpful in making health care decisions in their own families (Stolberg, 2001). Other embedded health messages included AIDS awareness themes on soap operas and pro-condom messages on the sitcom Friends (Brown & Walsh-Childers, 2002) and the teen-oriented shows Feliciiy and Dawson’s Creek (Rosenzweig, 1999).

In examining explicit public health media campaigns, Flay and Burton (1990; see also Brown & Einsiedel, 1990) identified seven steps for public health media campaign to be maximally effective:

1. Develop and use high-quality messages, sources, and channels.

2. Disseminate effectively to the most appropriate target audience.

3. Gain and keep the attention of the audience.

4. Encourage favorable interpersonal communication about the issue after exposure to the message.

5. Work for behavior changes, as well as changes in awareness, knowledge, and attitudes.

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6. Work for broader societal changes.

7. Obtain knowledge of campaign effectiveness through evaluation research.

Interestingly enough, all of these apply as well to E-E, and in fact these goals may often be better met through E-E than through traditional social marketing PSA campaigns. For example, people will attend more to gripping entertainment media than to PSAs and will talk more about them later. The audiences are potentially huge for these messages. Of course, there are ethical issues of concern, particularly in the case of messages not everyone would agree with. For example, if ER had a script strongly supporting or opposing abortion, large numbers of viewers would likely be incensed. Still, the E-E path is probably one that deserves a closer look in Western countries. Indeed, one study showed that popular and sympathetic gay characters like Will Truman on Will and Grace may do a lot toward increasing the broader society’s acceptance of homosexuals (Bonds-Raacke, Cady, Schlegel, Harris, & Firebaugh, 2004).