Week 13: Entertainment Education

As we talked about in class this week, entertainment and pop culture are potentially powerful tools for us to use to get health messages out to the general public. These are especially great avenues for reaching those people with low involvement in our health issue. However, health ed through pop culture may not work for everyone (including those with high issue involvement. Therefore as health educators we also need to utilize other education strategies to influence those who don't give much credibility to the Simpsons or Sex in the City.
However, as Dr. Engelberg mentioned, most people are going to have low involvement in our issues. So maybe entertainment education is the right path to go down. Ideally it would be nice if we could use all the different avenues we have available to consistently relay the same messages through these different channels. For example, if Sex in the City characters were consistently shown using condoms, while news shows talked to health experts who stressed the importance of always using condoms, while radio skits also talked about when and how to use condoms, etc. all different audience segments would be getting the same health message through various ways and hopefully they would pay attention to the source that is most compelling to them.