| Chapter 2: | Review of Relevant Literature |
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Communication scholars Everett Rogers’ and Arvind Singhal’s book, Entertainment-Education: A Strategy for Social Change, dealt with the theoretical underpinnings of entertainment-education, as they also examined potential ethical challenges posed by the strategy. These authors also provided an in-depth discussion of the enormously successful Peruvian soap opera Simplemente Maria, which was the unintentional precursor of entertainment-education.
Among other issues, Rogers and Singhal looked at an entertainment-education soap opera in India and at the effects of the strategy when applied to music and radio. They concluded their work by looking at the overall effects of entertainment-education and the lessons that have been learned about the strategy.
In the 1993 book Serial Fiction in TV: The Latin American Telenovelas, edited by Anamaria Fadul, several contributors analyzed Brazilian soap operas. After this assessment, contributors Everett Rogers, Arvind Singhal and William Brown discussed the strategy needed to produce a successful entertainment-education “telenovela.” They pointed out (p. 151) that there are a number of things to do: decide on a central educational value everyone can agree on; find “an integrated multi disciplinary theoretical framework which, among other things, drew upon Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory” (p. 151); and have access to a quality production system.
In her unpublished 1997 master’s thesis, The Impact of Social Learning Theory in an Entertainment-Education Radio Soap Opera, communication researcher Krista Alford evaluated the effects of Albert Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory in a Tanzanian entertainment-education soap opera, Twende na Wakati, or Let’s Go with the Times. Alford tested three independent variables “for their differences and their correlations between family planning adoption as a result of listening to the soap opera” (Alford, 1997, p. v).
For each of the three independent variables she tested, Alford found that there were significant differences in the mean scores of nonadopters and adopters of family planning as a result of listening to Twende na Wakati. The same was true for the adopters of the three specific methods of contraception. However, she wrote, “there was not always a difference in the expected direction between the adopters of family planning methods other than the pill, injectables, or condoms versus adopters of the pill, injectables, or condoms respectively” (p. v).