Promoting Health in the Entertainment Format?

How Minors Perceive and Evaluate Health-Related Messages in TV Entertainment

In the USA, Entertainment-Education was already developed at the end of the 1960’s as a concept, which exploited the attractiveness of entertainment offerings, in order to sensitise difficult-to-access target groups to topics related to health, among other things. To do this, a message promoting health and integrated into an attractive offering in the media or a specialised offer is deliberately developed on the basis of the entertainment-education concept. Various studies testify to the concept’s effectiveness to the extent that it could be shown that these pedagogically motivated offers could contribute to sensitising people to the topics and in a few cases to a change in attitude or behaviour as well. At the same time, however, comparatively little attention was paid to the placing of specifically directed media messages in a heterogeneous, partially contradictory programme environment (for example, advertising for alcohol, sweets [candy] etc.) and also to the competition with other socialising influences.

In the context of a qualitative study, the question was, therefore, investigated as to whether and in what way young people do notice health-related messages at all in fictional programmes in the context of their general use of the media and how they evaluate them. The results show that health-related fictional offers certainly leave traces and can contribute to sensitising people to health-related topics, but they also point to the limits of the entertainment-education initiative.