Practicing entertainment for social change in the United States: comparing the influences of U.S.-based documentary storytelling and print campaign resources in a univision prosocial media campaign

ABSTRACT

In the United States, Hispanic children experience dramatically different educational outcomes compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Educational disparities begin at the earliest phases of formal education; left unaddressed, challenges can persist. To address this, Univision, the most-watched Spanish-language network in the United States, launched Camino al Éxito (Road to Success), a multimedia prosocial storytelling campaign designed to reach parents with helpful messages about key risk transitions through the K-12 education life cycle. Following narrative engagement theory, this study sought to understand the role of narrative-based information utilized in this entertainment-based prosocial campaign by examining U.S. Hispanic parents’ (N = 153) responses to a short TV documentary and a printed campaign resource document. Those exposed to the documentary showed significantly higher posttest mean levels of knowledge than the print condition. Results suggest that documentary storytelling can be effectively employed in prosocial entertainment media campaigns for social change.

KEYWORDS:

• Entertainment-education
• documentary
• prosocial entertainment
• social change
• TV

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Note that this article uses ‘Hispanic’ as the official designation for this particular ethnic group in the United States, following the continued and current official U.S. Census designation, which describes Hispanic origin as: ‘the heritage, nationality, lineage, or country of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before arriving in the United States. People who identify as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be any race.’ Notably, we also made this decision to follow Univision, the central media company examined as part of this study, given its continued use of the term ‘Hispanic’ within the most-watched Spanish language TV network in the United States. The term ‘Hispanic’ was used in the primary research instrument for this study, as well. Finally, while we understand that ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latinx’ are often used interchangeably, and both are gender non-binary, the Real Academia of Española, the official reference source on the Spanish language, does not recognize ‘Latinx.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Multiply Bureau for the Gates Foundation.