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I will write about the MDGs soon but I’m super busy with final reports for our donors and partners, in the meantime, I wanted to share with you a CNN interview with a dear friend Sandra Buffington from the Hollywood, Health and Society
Let me know your thoughts on using health related messages in entertainment programming.
I’m back in London and feeling quite energised after my trip to LA – not only because of the refreshing weather (which obviously did help), but because of the research agenda conference. I was quite hasty in my judgment of the ‘research’ people not being able to think outside the box, because by the end of the two days they had proved me wrong, with some really insightful approaches. It’s given me the desire to want to do something new.
The research stuff was also interesting – I was worried that they’d use jargon that I’d have no idea what they were talking about, but a lot of it was in layman’s terms. They also did a lot of stuff on social networking that was really interesting. One of the most interesting presentations revolved around the idea of social networks being associated with behaviour – ultimately people associate with others like themselves.
It seems obvious enough – and actually if you’ve ever been to any school with the cliques (or even in workplace settings coming to think of it), you’ll know how important the influences in these networks can be, and even the importance of your social networks. Such thinking helps you to target your efforts – think about it, the diffusers of change will be faster when led by popular opinion leaders (think Oprah).
Now I need to figure out how to identify the influencers for our audience… Though thinking about it, it’s probably the people we see in popular culture… hmmmm that might be a bit of a problem. Let me think about that one.
I’m really excited that next week I’ll be participating in the Hollywood Health and Society research conference in LA. And not only because I’ll be in LA and getting away from this lovely British weather!
The conference aims to bring together top researchers to discuss the challenges and limitations and way forward with research on entertainment education and global health policy. Ok written down it does seem quite boring.
It is fascinating though. For some of us who have been doing entertainment education for well over 10 years (scary but true), this really is interesting. Instinctively you know it works (entertainment education that is), and you can do focus groups, and survey people on intentions/actions as a result of the programme or track feedback, calls to helplines, traffic to sites etc, but is that enough?
So what is the research you need to be doing and if its self-reported, how do you know its true? Other limitations are the obvious ones with focus groups – how do you know participants aren’t telling you what you want to hear? I’m not a researcher so those are the thoughts that come to my mind but I’m sure a good, qualified researcher knows how to combat this… I guess.
But when you work in a global environment where people are different, they receive and respond to messages differently, and indeed even the message delivery is different, how do you measure it in order to do effective comparisons? These are the questions I ask myself whenever we air a show globally. Is it ineffective if people in one part of the world didn’t like it, or if it didn’t move them to act or engage? Or is it all good as long as someone somewhere in the world got it?
The more I work in this sector – of entertainment education – the more I want to make sure we’re getting it right, so I’m excited to go to this conference, just at the thought of learning something that might positively impact my work – that and the fact that I’ll be near the beach!
I’ve been meaning to write about this for ages. Late last year – in December – Sandra Buffington from the Hollywood Health and Society Research came to London and visited with my team. Her work is so similar to what we do and I really admired the work that they do that I was so excited to have her share her work and results in the hope that the team could see how much potential there is in our field.
I love what they do, it is something I’d love to do more of, which is put social messages into popular mainstream programming like Law and Order, Greys Anatomy, ER, 90210. And it’s everything from HIV/AIDS to biopolar disorder. To top it off they have the stats to prove that this stuff works. People seem more likely to take in a message when it’s put into an entertaining format, or in a situation that they can relate to.
It’s what I aspire to do with Staying Alive and all other MTV SR programming and I think we’re on the right track, with Shuga, Tribes and Not to Me – if you don’t know, you better google it!
I also think it’s the way to go in Africa. To often Africa gets programming in the form of documentaries, newspieces and PSAs. Yes Africans are probably more into news type content than other young people in other continents, but its just information in a one dimensional way that sooner or later gets boring. Making the issue more three dimensional through holistic programming, especially through fictional characters and storylines to address ‘taboo’ subjects drives the message home.
This is way I’m especially proud of my brother, Fred Phiri, for using his talent to write and produce the drama series Club Risky Business in Zambia. To see the whole series go to the Club Risky Business Channel.
Enjoy