Chapter 6: Prosocial Television for Community Problems

Summary

Prevention professionals have often steered away from using media because of the mistaken notion that media cannot be effective for behavior change. This chapter presents one integrative framework, “behavioral systems,” useful for conceptualizing, designing, implementing, and evaluating media-based, particularly televised, preventive efforts. Effective elements and variables for such behavior change efforts are gleaned from the framework and related literatures and are shown to be operative in a number of successful prosocial and health promotion television spots and programs, as well as being applicable to various “news media” efforts. However, a major problem is gaining access to the media. Typically, in the U.S., extensive resources are required to deliver televised messages, even at a local level. This central problem is discussed in relationship to regulatory policy and ways to work within the current broadcast system, as well as ways to bypass the system, so as to deliver specialized content to specific target audiences.