ABSTRACT
Since 1982 the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Communication Programs assisted in some 125 entertainment-education productions worldwide designed to improve public health. Almost all major projects include both explicit health advice and implicit efforts to influence the broader social norms that help determine individual health behavior, such as the treatment of girls and women, distribution of wealth, inequities in access to health care, and environmental protection. Entertainment-education serial dramas proved especially effective in changing knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and norms because they evoke emotions, create role models, stimulate discussion among listeners and viewers, and show the ultimate consequences of both healthy and unhealthy behavior to large, attentive audiences.
