We develop four major hypotheses for why mass media might affect fertility. These include economic and time use effects of the medium, effects of ideas on policy actions of members of the elite, general effects on population basic values and fertility—specific cognitions, and effects of deliberate mass media—based interventions on fertility—related behavior. The paper examines correlational and some longitudinal evidence at the cross—national, intranational, and individual levels, as well as the evidence for effects of deliberate interventions. The correlational evidence is consistent with a mass media effect on fertility. However, the evidence about discrete program effects, which reveals short—lived increases in demand for clinic services, is less consistent. We speculate that, if the spread of mass media has effects on fertility, it reflects a complex social process rather than a medium effect or a discrete learning process: multiple channels, providing reinforcing messages, over time, producing interpersonal discussion and a slow change in values, and working at a level of social aggregation higher than the individual.
This article argues that social entrepreneurship has not yet been adequately defined even though it is increasingly being used in social change/development practice. Muhammad Yunus, creator of the Grameen Bank and microlending, and Bill Drayton, founder of the global change agency Ashoka, have practiced social change through social entrepreneurship for more than 30 years. Increasingly, the development community has been adopting many of its practices. The basic process of social entrepreneurship involves: defining a social goal for the solution of a serious problem; innovation in solving the problem; ability to expand the organization to serve large numbers of people (scaling up); focusing on the social bottom line with empirical evidence (impact evaluation). Three cases are briefly reviewed to illustrate this process. Finally the article examines how these practices might help Communication for Development (C4D) to better adapt its own practices in achieving real change with people.
This chapter traces the beginnings of the field of communication for development (c4d), from the very early years of development aid with Harry S. Truman's “Four Points” speech to Congress in 1949 through the 1960s and the early definition of the modernization-diffusion paradigm that set the direction of c4d for at least two decades. It also examines the three founding texts of c4d: Daniel Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958), Everett Rogers's Diffusion of Innovations (the 1962 first edition), and Wilbur Schramm's Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in Developing Countries (1964). Finally, the chapter looks at the major histories of the general field of communication study to better understand how the beginnings of the c4d field grew organically from the first period of mass communication studies in the United States. It concludes that c4d is intimately tied to the emerging mass communication field in the context of the cold war and national and international institutions providing funding for development and communication projects.
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