3.2. Entertainment-Education

Entertainment-education refers to “the process of purposely designing and implementing a media message to both entertain and educate, in order to increase audience knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior” (Singhal and Rogers 1999, xii). Like social marketing and health promotion, entertainment-education is concerned with social change at the individual and community levels (Manoff, 1985). Its focus is on how entertainment media such as soap operas, songs, cartoons, comics and theater can be used to transmit information that can result in pro-social behavior.

Originally developed in Mexico in the mid-1970s, the entertainment-education approach has been used in 75 countries, including Gambia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Turkey. Paradigmatic examples of this approach have been soap operas in Latin America (telenovelas) and in India that were intended to provide information about family planning, sexual behavior, and other health issues. Literacy and agricultural development have also been central themes of several entertainment-education efforts. The use of entertainment to achieve development objectives is not new. In the 1970s, the Academy for Educational Development documented numerous case studies of the effective use of soap operas, songs, and theater to convey health and nutrition information in the developing world.   

In the health sector, entertainment-education is a strategy that has been applied to maximize the reach and effectiveness of messages through the combination of entertainment and education. As its assumptions are drawn from socio-psychology and human communication theories, entertainment-education can fall under the modernization/diffusion theory area. Like diffusion theory, it is concerned with behavior change through the dissemination of information. It is influenced by Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory, a framework currently dominant in health promotion. Entertainment-education is anchored on the idea that individuals learn behavior by observing role models, particularly in the mass media. Imitation and influence are the expected outcomes of interventions. Entertainment-education telenovelas were based on Bandura’s model of cognitive sub-processes: attention, retention, production, and motivational processes that help researchers to understand why individuals imitate socially desirable behavior. This process depends on the existence of role models in the messages: good models, bad models, and those who transition from bad to good. Besides social learning, entertain-education strategies are based on the idea that expected changes result from self-efficacy, the belief of individuals that they can complete specific tasks (Maibach and Murphy 1995).

Entertainment-education draws on the fact that populations around the world are widely exposed to entertainment media content. The heavy consumption of media messages suggests that the media, more than any other tool, can effectively persuade how people think, feel, and behave. Most entertainment programs, however, tend to dramatize anti-social messages such as aggression, violence, and sexual promiscuity. But as Miguel Sabido has shown, entertainment programs can be redirected to communicate positive messages that can help people solve their problems, instead of glorifying antisocial themes (Singhal and Rogers, 1999).

Simplemente María, a 1969 Peruvian telenovela, has been often mentioned as having pioneered entertainment-education even though it was not intended to have pro-social effects (Singhal and Rogers, 1999). The central character was Maria, a maid who attended adult literacy classes in the evening. The program traced an individual’s success in moving from a village to the city and, by overcoming many obstacles, climbing the social class ladder despite resistance from urban elites.  The highly entertaining telenovela had unexpected educational effects:  It inspired low-status women viewers to enroll in adult literacy classes and sewing classes, raising their perceived self-efficacy (an individual’s belief that he or she is able to take action and control specific outcomes) and ability for social learning (individuals not only learn through their own experiences but also by observing and imitating the behavior of other individuals who are role models).

Besides television entertainment, entertainment-education interventions were also implemented in music and music videos that promoted sexual control, and in radio soap operas that promoted women’s issues, awareness of AIDS, sex education, and family planning. In the mid-1980s, a campaign was implemented to promote sexual restraint among Mexican teenagers. It consisted of songs and music videos featuring a male and female singer as well as public service announcements. Evaluation analysis concluded that the campaign had a number of positive consequences: teenagers felt freer to talk about sex, they became more sensitized to the relevance of sex, the messages reinforced the choices of teenagers who already practiced abstinence, and the messages led to a modest increase in the demand for family planning services (Singhal and Rogers, 1999).

Research studies suggest that the entertainment-education strategy, which is mainly motivational, could be a catalyst for triggering interpersonal communication about issues and lessons from interventions, and in engaging and motivating individuals to change their behavior and support changes in behavior among their peers. Rogers et al. (1999) concluded that a soap-opera radio broadcast in Tanzania played an important role in changing the fertility rate of that country. The broadcast increased the listeners’ sense of self-efficacy, the ideal age marriage for women, and the rate of acceptance for contraceptive use, interspousal communication about family planning, and for the practice of family planning. A hierarchy of effects was observed in interventions in Mexico, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Campaigns contributed to audience recall, comprehension, agreement, and discussions with others about the messages that were promoted in the campaigns.