Entertainment-Education

Entertainment-education (E-E) is a theory-based communication strategy for purposefully embedding educational and social issues in the creation, production, processing, and dissemination process of an entertainment program in order to achieve desired individual, community, institutional, and societal changes among the intended media user populations.

Theorizing is an integral part of every aspect of the E-E strategy, from designing a program to its evaluation. For example, Miguel Sabido, a television writer-producer-director in Mexico, developed a methodology for E-E soap operas, centering on Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura's social learning theory, which explains how human beings learn new behaviors by observing mass-mediated role models. In operationalizing Bandura's concept of role modeling, Sabido hypothesized that the relationship between an audience member and a media role model goes beyond the cognitive information-processing domain. For instance, audience members participate in parasocial relationships, analogous to real relationships, with media personalities and readily invite these people into their homes via television or radio. They may even talk to these characters by addressing the television or radio set.

Thoughtful, deliberate, and purposeful embedding of educational messages in entertainment genres, in all their nuance and complexity, is central to the E-E strategy. That is, E-E is not just inserting an educational message in an entertainment program but involves the development of creative ideas for programming, the actual production and dissemination, audience-centered information processing and interpersonal dialogue, and individual and collective decisions and actions. E-E programs often contribute to social change at the middle- and macrolevel by influencing social dynamics between and among individuals, cultural groups, communities, organizations, and social systems at large. An E-E strategy is directed at an intended media user population, comprising audiences of mass media products (newspapers, films, television, and radio) and/or consumers of games and virtual environments. Consider the following examples of mass media-sparked social changes in three locations on three continents.

[Page 343]In 1996, All India Radio in New Delhi, India, then broadcasting a radio soap opera Tinka Tinka Sukh (Happiness Lies in Small Things), received a colorful poster-letter signed by 184 community members from a village named Lutsaan in India's Uttar Pradesh state. It stated that listening to Tinka Tinka Sukb had benefited the village, particularly the women, and that listeners came to oppose dowries and would not participate in this practice. Listeners in Lutsaan said they were stirred by Poonam's character—a young bride, who is beaten and verbally abused by her husband and in-laws for not providing an adequate dowry, the payment by a bride's parents to the groom's parents.

In 2000, when Camilla, the protagonist on Lazos de Sangre (Blood Ties), a popular Brazilian tele-novela, was diagnosed with leukemia, the Brazilian National Registry of Bone Marrow Donors reported that new donor registrations increased by 45 times: from about 20 a month to 900 a month.

On August 3, 2001, when Tony was diagnosed with HIV on an episode of the popular soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, the number of calls within the hour to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's AIDS hotline increased 16 times over the previous hour. This storyline, which ran during 7 months, was seen in over 100 countries, for an estimated audience of about 400 million people.

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