Storytelling for Social Change: Leveraging Documentary and Comedy for Public Engagement in Global Poverty

"Stand Up Planet's strategic use of comedy as an entry to exploring serious social issues provides a viable model for how entertaining, humorous documentaries can stimulate public engagement with global poverty."

This paper, published in a special section of the Journal of Communication (see Related Summaries, below), looks at the possible influence of documentary storytelling in the context of entertainment-education storytelling effects. Specifically, it examines shifts in United States (US) audience engagement with global poverty after watching two documentaries that used different editorial approaches to global poverty storytelling: the comedic Stand Up Planet, compared with the somber The End Game. "The study explores the extent to which viewing each documentary increased awareness of global poverty, support for government aid, knowledge, and intended actions, and whether and to what extent each narrative's level of transportation, relatability, positive or negative emotions, and perceived entertainment value mediates these effects."

The premise of the investigation is that public engagement is a required element to promote sustained social change in global poverty. However, storytelling about a vast problem like this one has its challenges, as outlined in the paper. As a result, "many visual stories related to the topic, from long-form journalism to short-form advocacy, public service announcements, and videos, have often tended to follow a few similar frames or themes: passive victims of poverty, or overwhelming explanatory facts and statistics offered with pleas for help." Despite their potential to break out of a familiar and possibly desensitising mold, storytelling genres with contemporary cultural relevance and availability in the digital era, such as documentary and comedy, there is little to no real evidence that illuminates how and why these types of storytelling might play a crucial role in public engagement strategies. There is a similar gap in research evaluating how a comedic approach to nonfiction storytelling might be effective.

It is in this context that the first author of this paper and her team produced an hour-long comedic documentary TV special, Stand Up Planet (see Related Summaries, below), in an effort to engage a US audience in topics related to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Inspired by an entertainment–education model, the documentary was developed as a comedic and travelogue style to explore two particular global poverty topics: sanitation-related illness in India, and HIV infection in South Africa. Its core narrative device was to follow comedians' jokes into their central social issues through visits with people living in areas affected by extreme poverty. The idea is that "a comedic treatment of a social issue, followed by more substantive information about the issue - may help reduce message discounting or issue trivialization while maintaining the other persuasive benefits of a funny, entertaining format." Stand Up Planet premiered theatrically in the US in April 2014, and on three TV networks in May 2014: independent satellite network KCETLink; cable network Pivot; and a top broadcast network in India, NDTV. It may now be viewed online (see below).

The paper delves into mechanisms for entertainment and documentary engagement, such as transportation and identification. "Transportation occurs when media audiences are temporarily absorbed into an entertaining story, becoming so immersed in and personally connected to the events of the narrative that they lose touch with their immediate surroundings and are changed as a result." And identification is "the process by which audiences connect with a particular character in a narrative in such a way as to take on the perspective and goals of that character." In sum, the research reviewed here suggests that "narratives are compelling sources of social influence because of their ability to foster transportation and identification, stimulate emotions, and create entertaining experiences. As yet, however, little is known about how these processes operate in the context of comedy and comedic documentary, in particular."

To answer the research questions, the authors used a pre–post experimental design with a national sample of 1,258 people. The study was conducted entirely online during September 2014. Participants first answered a series of questions designed to measure their baseline knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours regarding various global health and poverty issues. The researchers then randomly assigned participants to watch one of 2-hour-long TV documentaries: either Stand Up Planet or The End Game. (The latter film, which premiered on the Al Jazeera cable network in the US in May 2014, has a somber, earnest tone and takes a traditional long-form journalistic approach to document efforts to eradicate malaria in Tanzania.) Immediately after the screenings, participants completed a posttest that gauged their responses to the film they watched and reassessed their knowledge, attitudes, and intended behaviours. In addition, immediately after the posttest, 10 respondents from each experimental condition (20 total) were asked to participate in a one-on-one online chat to provide broad feedback about the film they had watched.

Selected results:

• As can be seen in Table 1 on page 690, viewers of both Stand Up Planet and The End Game exhibited significant pre- to posttest increases in support for government aid (on the part of the US government to economically poor countries overseas), awareness (of eight global poverty topics), and knowledge of global poverty issues, using eight true/false questions. However, the gains in awareness and knowledge were significantly larger for viewers of Stand Up Planet. (The difference between the two conditions in support for government aid was not statistically significant.) Respondents were asked about eight different types of high-level social action that they could take to become involved with global poverty and health as an issue (e.g., contacting an elected official through an online petition or social media). Looking to action, the posttest mean, controlling for baseline levels, was significantly higher for viewers of Stand Up Planet.
• As can be seen in Table 1 as well as Table 2 on page 691, with regard to the mediators, relatability, positive emotion, and perceived entertainment value were significantly higher for viewers of Stand Up Planet, whereas narrative transportation and negative emotions were significantly higher for viewers of The End Game. The mediators were, for the most part, positive predictors of engagement with global poverty issues. Transportation was positively associated with support for government aid, awareness, action, and knowledge. Relatability was positively associated with action but negatively associated with knowledge. Positive emotion was positively associated with awareness and knowledge. Negative emotion was positively associated with awareness and action but negatively associated with knowledge. Perceived entertainment value was positively associated with support for government aid, awareness, and action.
• As can be seen in Table 3 on page 692, overall, the total indirect effects of Stand Up Planet were positive and significant for support for government aid, awareness, and action; they were not significant for knowledge. This means that, with the exception of knowledge, the net indirect effect of Stand Up Planet through the mediators was positive,largely owing to the strong influence via perceived entertainment value.

In short, both documentaries increased awareness of global poverty, support for government aid, knowledge, and intended actions. However, Stand Up Planet produced significantly larger gains in awareness, knowledge, and actions; these effects were mediated by the narrative's relatability, positive emotions, and entertainment value. The End Game's effects were mediated by narrative transportation and negative emotions. "From a research perspective, it is important to note that perceived entertainment value - which has been less studied than other mediators of narrative persuasion - was one of the most consistent predictors of audience engagement with global poverty; it is thus a variable that may be deserving of deeper attention in future work."

The authors discuss implications for narrative in social change campaigns that might be useful for social-change communication strategists and practitioners.

1. "[T]his study highlights the need for communication scholars, social-change communicators, and media producers to engage with one another - both in the production of stories and development of public engagement strategies."
2. "A mixed-message media diet - one that includes stories and frames that offer optimistic perspectives, such as comedy, rather than nearly exclusively dire scenarios that can lead to chronic audience exhaustion and disengagement - may be a path to new engagement."
3. "The study...examines only one pair of documentaries, thus minimizing the ability to generalize broadly to other films, and it examines audience response at one point in time, rather than a longer-term follow-up....Thus, a study designed to explore how different forms of engagement with documentary storytelling temporally relate to one another in the production of social change would be a beneficial future research project."
4. "[E]motional engagement in documentary storytelling is not a monolithic concept, according to this study...: Comedy's positive emotions are as important for sparking audience engagement as somber storytelling's negative emotions. Moving forward, expanding these lines of work - and creating intentional collaborations between researchers, social-change communicators, and storytellers - would effectively help to shape public engagement solutions to serious social issues that affect the global community."