Sunday, August 21, 2011

Plan B 4.0 Mobilizing To Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown - TV and Radio Dramas Change Behavior

"While the attention of researchers has focused on the role of formal education in reducing fertility, soap operas on radio and television can even more quickly change people's attitudes about reproductive health, gender equity, family size, and environmental protection. A well-written soap opera can gave profound near-term effect on population growth. It costs relatively little and can proceed even while formal educational systems are being expanded.

The Power of this approach was pioneered by Miguel Sabido, a vice president of Televis, Mexico's national television network, when he did a series of soap opera segments on illiteracy. The day after one of the characters in his soap opera visited a literacy office wanting to learn how to read and write, a quarter-million people showed up at these offices in Mexico City. Eventually 840,000 Mexicans enrolled in literacy courses after watching the series.

Sabido dealt with contraception in a soap opera entitled Acompaname, which translates as Come With Me. Over the span of a decade this drama series helped reduce Mexico's birth rate by 34%.

Other groups outside Mexico quickly picked up this approach. The U.S.-based Population Media Center (PMC) headed by William Ryerson, has initiated projects in some 15 countries and is planning launches in several others. The PMC's work in Ethiopia over the last several years provides a telling example. Their radio serial dramas broadcast in Amharic and Oromiffa have addressed issues of reproductive health and gender equity, such as HIV/AIDS, family planning, and the education of girls. A survey two years after the broadcasts began in 2002 found that 63% of new clients seeking reproductive health care at Ethiopia's 48 service centers had listened to one of PMC's dramas.

Among married women in the Amhara region of Ethiopia who listened to the dramas, there was a 55-percent increase in those using family planning. Male listeners sought HIV tests at a rate four times that of non-listeners, while female listeners were tested at three times the rate of female non-listeners. The average number of children per woman in the region dropped from 5.4 to 4.3. And demand for Contraceptives increased 157 percent."

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Drew Westen - NY Times - Why stories matter

"The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out 'the facts of the case.' "