Page 221 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

210 ROGERS

interpersonal communication among peers, which in turn influences
behavior change. 12
Rogers and others (1999) investigated the effects of a 5-year
entertainment-education 13 radio soap opera in Tanzania that was
designed to promote the adoption of family planning methods and
HIV/AIDS prevention. The soap opera centered on a dozen main char-
acters who represented positive and negative role models for family
planning and HIV/AIDS prevention. For instance, Mkwaju (literally
“walking stick”) is a promiscuous truck driver and a male chauvinist,
who displays strong son preference. A negative role model for the two
educational issues, he is punished in the soap opera’s story line; ulti-
mately he becomes seropositive and suffers from AIDS.
Data were gathered via personal interviews from about 3,000 respon-
dents in mid-1993, prior to broadcast of the twice-weekly episodes of the
soap opera Twende na Wakati (Let’s Go with the Times). Annual samples of
about 3,000 respondents were interviewed in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997.
The radio program was not broadcast in 1993–1995 in the Dodoma region
of Tanzania, which served as a control (or comparison) group, in order to
remove the effects of contemporaneous changes on the main dependent
variables of family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention.
Although the degree of exposure to the radio soap opera was highly
related to its effects, most individuals adopted family planning and
HIV/AIDS prevention as the result of interpersonal communication stimulated
by the entertainment-education radio soap opera (Rogers et al., 1999;
Vaughan et al., 2000; Vaughan & Rogers, 2000). The degree of listening
to Twende na Wakati was related to spouse/partner discussions of family
planning and HIV/AIDS prevention, which in turn was related to the
adoption of family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention. Discussion of
family planning with others increased from 17% of audience members
in 1993–1994 (the first year of broadcasting the radio soap opera) to 53%
in 1996–1997 (Vaughan, 2000). Married women who were both exposed
to the radio soap opera and who talked about it with their spouse/part-

12 Intermedia processes, a term coined by Gumpert and Cathcart (1986), were referred to as
“mass media-generated interpersonal communication” by Valente, Poppe, and Merritt
(1996).
13 Entertainment-education is the strategy of placing educational content in entertainment
messages in order to change the overt behavior of audience members concerning the educa-
tional issue. This entertainment-education strategy has been utilized to promote family
planning, female equality, adult literacy, and HIV/AIDS prevention in over 100 different
projects, mainly in developing countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Singhal &
Rogers, 1999).