| Chapter 1: | Background and Significance of the Study |
Entertainment-education (defined for the purposes of this study as a derivative of informal education): “The process of purposely designing and implementing a media message both to entertain and educate, in order to increase audience members’ knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior. Entertainment-education seeks to capitalize on the appeal of popular media to show individuals how they can live safer, happier lives” (Piotrow et al., 1997; Piotrow, Meyer & Zulu, 1992; Singhal & Brown, 1996 – as cited in Singhal & Rogers 1999, p. 9).
Agenda-setting: Is defined for the purposes of this research as the importance of an issue on the mass media agenda.
Researcher Biases and Limitations of the Study
As well as being the author of this book, I have been in ministry to the homeless for more than 20 years and could thus be considered an insider. This fact may cause some people to question the credibility of the research. However, I compensated for this in three ways: 1) hiring two people to read the broadcast transcripts and the newspaper articles; 2) hiring a person to interview the homeless people staying at Joy Junction (this person was also one of the readers for media articles); 3) hiring a person who is marginally homed to aid me in identifying a sample of homeless people who were receiving services from three additional area agencies.
In addition, to mitigate an inherent bias the homeless individuals interviewed went beyond Joy Junction. I interviewed homeless people who were being assisted by three other Albuquerque, New Mexico-based agencies as described elsewhere.
Some of the material analyzed will not be random, but will be more of a theoretical sample. This means it would be inappropriate to infer the results of this research to all ministries to the homeless. In this study, the term “theoretical sample” is used in the sense originally described in Glaser and Strauss (1967) and subsequently in Glaser and Corbin (1998). Glaser and Corbin (1998, p. 73) describe this concept this way: “Sampling on the basis of emerging concepts, with the aim being to explore the dimensional range or varied conditions along which the properties of concepts vary.”