Telling the tale: the role of narratives in helping people respond to crises

ABSTRACT

During public health crises like infectious disease outbreaks, news media and governments are responsible for informing the public about how to protect themselves. A large body of health communication research finds that persuasive narratives motivate protective behaviors, such as intentions to vaccinate. In their seminal book on crisis narratives, Seeger and Sellnow (Narratives of crisis: Telling stories of ruin and renewal. Stanford University) theorized five narrative types: blame, renewal, victim, hero, and memorial. In this study, we tested how the public responds to crisis narratives about a hypothetical infectious disease crisis, modeled after narratives emerging from the 2014–2016 Ebola pandemic, through an online experiment with a U.S. adult sample (N = 1050). Findings showcase which crisis narratives positively affect public protective behaviors as well as emotional responses, assessments of information credibility, and attributions of crisis responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• disaster
• health
• infectious disease
• narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Brooke Fisher Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1985-8050

Yen-I. Lee http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7820-6568

Yan Jin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4228-5529

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 News stories modeled after community journalism stories on http://archive.eboladeeply.org.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a seed grant from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.