ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a holistic view of past and emerging trends in the research on narratives-particularly narrative persuasion-and, in doing so, integrates and organizes relevant concepts and theoretical perspectives across narrative research from entertainment media to public policy. Finally, the chapter calls for a narrative messaging typology that can be used to guide empirical narrative strategy research. In the public policy literature, certain structural elements are required to meet the definition of a policy narrative. Entertainment education (EE) research has relied heavily on social cognitive theory (SCT) to explain how, when, and under what conditions individuals learn from entertainment media. The Transportation Imagery Model (TIM) stems from a psychological perspective in which narratives are thought to have distinct features that encourage audiences to become transported into the story. Moving forward, researchers can use a narrative typology to examine differential effects between narrative types, as well as test the role of mediating and moderating variables across the quadrants.
