Entertainment‐Education (Overall)

Abstract

Entertainment‐education (EE) is not a theory but a communication strategy that involves the intentional placement of educational content in entertainment in order to change knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. It has been successfully implemented for a variety of health‐related issues in countries around the world for over 70 years. EE programs vary widely in terms of the extent to which they use formative research to test their message with the target audience and integrate communication theories in their message design. Successful programs generally do both and construct their stories based on the theory of the tone, social cognitive theory, and the theory of normative social behavior. Stories that transport the audience and facilitate identification with characters have been empirically shown to impact knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. For example, Murphy and colleagues conducted a large‐scale randomized clinical trial (RCT) that demonstrated that a narrative format of communicating information (compared to a non‐narrative format with identical health information) produced a stronger and more sustained impact on cervical cancer‐related knowledge, attitudes, and prevention behavior. The strongest impact was among women who both identified with the Latinx characters of Tamale Lesson and reported being transported into the story. Stories or narratives may be uniquely qualified to overcome persuasive resistance to health messages. By including a desired behavior in an entertaining program, EE can impact how common or normative the desired behavior is perceived to be and encourage others to mimic the behavior.