Identification With Characters, Elaboration, and Counterarguing in Entertainment-Education Interventions Through Audiovisual Fiction

Abstract

The aim of this article is to further knowledge of the explanatory processes of narrative persuasion in the field of health communication, using data obtained in a research study of entertainment-education based on audiovisual fiction. Participating in the study were 208 young persons between the ages of 14 and 20, randomly distributed to three different groups. Each of the groups was exposed to a different episode of the Colombian television series Revelados, desde todas las posiciones. The results showed that greater identification with the main character of the episode transmitting a prevention message was associated with greater cognitive elaboration, which in turn led to more favorable attitudes toward the topics addressed. However, counterarguing was not observed to play a significant mediating role. The findings of this study allow us to conclude that getting people to think and reflect can help persuade them, which suggests that narrative persuasion models and dual models of rhetorical persuasion can be compatible in certain contexts, such as when messages are designed in such a way that characters make explicit arguments that endorse a prosocial message through dialogues.

Notes

¹The program forms part of the Eduentretenimiento + Movilización = Cambio Social (Edutainment + Mobilization = Social Change) strategy that was a response by the national government of Colombia to the conditions and needs of Colombian young people in matters of sexual and reproductive health and rights.

²These episodes of RDTP are available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/REVELADOSDTP?feature=watch.

³At the suggestion of one of the anonymous reviewers of the article, we also carried out mediation analyses with PROCESS including sex and age as control variables. In these analyses the results were replicated for two of the three themes or episodes. The indirect effect was no longer significant in the episode addressing adolescent sexuality (B = .36, SE = .18, 95% CI [−.01, .63]), although the coefficients quantifying the association between identification and elaboration and between elaboration and attitude were positive, as in the original analyses (though the relation between elaboration and attitude was marginally significant, p < .054).

⁴Cognitive elaboration was significantly greater than counterarguing (M = 3.31, SD = 0.93, vs. M = 2.27, SD = 0.89, respectively), t(206) = 15.11, p < .001.

⁵Enjoyment was assessed with a 3-item scale by Hall and Zwarun (2012) (e.g., “I had a really good time watching this episode of the series”; from 1 =strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree; α = .85; M = 4.27, SD = 0.83).