Ke Wang, a Chinese television soap opera with a message

Encoded Exposure and Social Norms in Entertainment-Education

Entertainment-education is an effective health communication strategy that combines or embeds educational messages into entertainment programs to bring about social and behavior change. For years, scholars have considered how entertainment-education works. Some contemporary theories posit that entertainment-education does not engender behavior change directly but does so through mediating variables. This study adds to the literature on this topic by exploring the direct relationship between exposure and social norms instead of their relationship through behavior as a mediator. Novel to this study is the use of encoded exposure, a continuous and recognition-based measure of exposure that includes ever watching, recall, involvement, and dose in its operationalization. Using cross-sectional data from Kyunki … Jeena Issi Ka Naam Hai, an entertainment-education program in India, this exploratory analysis indicates a positive and significant relationship between encoded exposure and social norms. How can this finding be applied to future programs? Questions remain, and replication is needed, but if it is not essential to go through behavior in order to change social norms, then implications emerge for the theory and practice of entertainment-education.

Harnessing the potential of entertainment-education telenovelas

The enormous economic, political and social problems of the developing world call for creating effective, equitable, and socially responsible mass media programs that will solve human problems and benefit society. The present article investigates the use of the entertainment-education strategy in mass communication, especially focusing on the potential of telenovelas in addressing problems of national development. We trace the diffusion of the entertainment-education telenovelas from Mexico to other developing countries, and distill the lessons learned to date about the conditions (for instance, the physical and human resources) needed in a country to successfully design and implement the entertainment-education strategy.