East Los High: Examining the Interaction Effects of Entertainment Education and Explicit Persuasive Appeals on Safer Sex Behavioral Intentions

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis:  Given the continued burden of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in young adults within the United States, entertainment education (EE) narratives may be employed to support health-behavior change [1]. However, EE narratives must find a balance between subtlety and overt persuasion, as leaning too much either way may cause unintended effects [2]. For this, Slater [3] proposed placing an epilog at the end of an EE narrative, however, epilogs may reinforce (according to social cognitive theory [4]) or induce reactance towards the advocated behavior (according to extended elaboration likelihood model [5]). We thus proposed the following competing hypotheses:  H1: Exposure to an epilog following an EE narrative about safe sex will lead to positive intention change toward safe sex in comparison to the narrative without the epilog. H2: Exposure to an epilog following an EE narrative about safe sex will lead to negative intention change toward safe sex than will exposure to the narrative without the epilog.

Methods:  We employed a 2 (safe sex episode/control episode) X 2 (presence/absence of epilogue) between subjects design. Participants were US-based adults aged 18-26 years recruited online via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Measures included perceived persuasive intent and behavioral intention towards safe sex [6]. Stimuli consisted of episodes from popular TV soap East Los High, which was made to educate teens about sexual health and safe sex practices. Two-way ANOVA was run to test the hypotheses. The two independent variables were exposure condition (safe sex or control episode) and explicit appeal (presence or absence of epilog). Dependent variable was behavioral intention change (posttest - pretest) towards safer sex. 

Results:  Results showed perceived persuasive intent was significantly higher for the safe sex episode than the control episode. The results of the two-way ANOVA indicated that explicit appeal moderated the effect of exposure condition on behavioral intention change, and had significant main effect on behavioral intention change. Post Hoc results indicated the presence of an epilog only had an effect of increasing intention change positively when shown with the control episode), while it had little to no significant effect on intention change when shown with the safe sex episode.

Conclusions:  The high level of perceived persuasive intent for the safe sex episode indicates viewer’s understanding that the episode was meant to alter attitudes and behavior. In fact, there were multiple incidents within the episode when actors actively argue the benefits and consequences of safer sex; such a logical, didactic approach/strategy is more consistent with non-narrative persuasion [7]. To this end, viewers may have perceived repeated exposure to the narrative, thus resulting in no significant change in behavioral intentions. This hypothetical lies within the inconsistent literature regarding the impact of multiple exposure on behavioral compliance.

Implications for research and/or practice:  We highlight the importance of and give recommendations for EE practice to take into account narrative quality, in particular, to make sure that the persuasion tactics are in fact implicit and narrative events portrayed realistically, to facilitate the occurrence of narrative persuasion. *Note: no space to add references