The Entertaining Way to Behavioral Change: Fighting HIV with MTV

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

Disguising Prejudice: Popular Rationales as Excuses for Intolerant Expression

“…Our work also adds to a literature on the effects of media and propaganda on political and economic behavior (DellaVigna and La Ferrara, 2015;La Ferrara, 2016;Banerjee et al, 2019;La Ferrara et al, 2012;Bursztyn et al, 2020a). Prior literature on the effects of media on violence (Yanagizawa-Drott, 2014;Müller and Schwarz, 2018), protest participation (Enikolopov et al, forthcoming), and other public outcomes are generally unable to cleanly distinguish between direct persuasion and social image concerns arising from changes in higher-order beliefs.…”

In Search of Entertainment-Education’s Effects on Attitudes and Behaviors

“…That said, EE's effects are rarely large. One of the strongest reported effects is that Nigerians shown eight 22-minute episodes of the TV series MTV Shuga on consecutive weekends displayed increases in knowledge and HIV testing, with mixed results concerning risky sexual behavior (Banerjee, La Ferrara, & Orozco-Olvera, 2019a). In relative terms, HIV testing is almost twice as high in the treatment group as the control group, but in absolute terms, this effect amounts to a 3 percentage point increase (i.e., a change among 3 out of every 100 viewers).…”

Mind the Gap! Confronting the Challenges of Translational Communication Research in Entertainment-Education

“…Traditionally, EE program evaluations have relied heavily on audience reception surveys and have been criticized for participants' self-selection bias (Sherry, 1997). Over the past 25 years, scholars and practitioners have made extra efforts to secure resource and conduct assessments using more rigorous designs such as field experiments (e.g., Banerjee et al, 2019;Paluck, 2009;Vaughan et al, 2000). A recent meta-analysis on the use of EE narratives to promote safer sexual behaviors of youth from 1985 to 2017 only found 10 qualified publications using either a full or a quasi-experimental design in the field (Orozco-Olvera, Shen, & Cluver, 2019).…”