Communication for Social Change - Lessons from Soul City 4

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"CHANGE" AS A SOCIAL PROCESS

Soul City

• A South African NGO established in 1992
• Harnesses the power of mass media to support health and development
• Reaches over two thirds of the South African population
• Is used by another 8 African countries

Soul City 4

Multi-media edutainment vehicle

Advocacy campaign (in partnership with NNVAW)

• Media advocacy
• Community mobilization
• Lobbying of Government
• Connecting people to services - toll free helpline(s)

Extracts - Soul City 4 Evaluation

• Data from 5 of the 7 evaluation studies
• Investigation of Soul City's impact across all the “domains” of change
• Cuts across all the intervention components
  
  

• The powerful synergistic impact of intervention components simultaneously targeting several domains of social change in an integrated manner [domestic violence]
• Key aspects around impacting on communities through community leaders, structures and processes [AIDS & domestic violence]
• The importance of impacting on interpersonal communication and subjective social norms [AIDS]

Soul City Multi Media Edutainment Vehicle

Associated with

• Stimulating dialogue and debate - interpersonally as well as in communities;
• Shifting perceptions of social norms
• Increasing support-seeking and support-giving behaviour
• Participation in public protest against VAW

SC / NNVAW Partnership

Community mobilization

Media advocacy

12% of media coverage nationally on VAW over the intervention period referred to or reported on community action.

Implementation of the Domestic Violence Act - 15 December 1999

"There were pressures...there were pressures from occasions where people held marches and stuff like that."

[SA Police Services]

"...there was a lot of newspaper reports about the Domestic Violence Act...the concerns, it's long overdue"

[Department of Justice]

"You get phone calls every single day from people wanting to know what the hell is going on, why are you delaying the process."

[SA Police Services]

"I remember last year in class I was talking to my students, I then asked boys if they marry, will they beat their wives. One said ‘yes', they should be beaten. I was really shocked on hearing that. But I then told him that gone are the days where you will beat your wife and nothing happens, these days you go to jail for the rest of you life."

[Urban teacher]

"It [Soul City] says they [women] have their rights. If you undermine their rights you are in trouble; you can even go to jail..."

[Urban male]

Change is mediated through community leaders, organizational leaders, service providers

• As individuals, in leadership positions / in their institutional positions
• In interaction with their communities, constituencies, patients...
  
  • Communication
  • Understanding of issues - service delivery
• Local (organisational) policy and practice

"With me the influence I got from Soul City is that I should not be ashamed any more to talk about sexual matters with the youth, because if I do then I am not a good Shepard. They need guidance from us because most of the time they don't get it from home...so I really got help from Soul City because now I am able to explain things to them that I found difficult before. Because what they have done they have touched topics involving the youths.. now I see there's nothing to it - I just speak to them truthfully and they respect that, and that is thanks to Soul City."

[Urban preacher]

'De-individualisation' of reported impact

• people define themselves as part of the collective / part of a community
• perceptions that the collective (norms and behaviour) is changing

"What I have noticed is that the part Soul City played in AIDS awareness is one they [youth] don't forget, because you can hear them when they are talking about it - they will always mention Soul City because there it was discussed thoroughly."

[Urban teachers]

"Before, people were very ashamed to talk about condoms, but since this picture [Soul City] has been playing for a long time, things have changed."

[Urban male]

Impact on Social Norms

from National Survey, Sentinel Site Surveys.

"People with HIV/AIDS should be moved away"

Social Comparison * Talking about HIV/AIDS

Importance of perceiving a change in one's reference group's attitudes:

Perception of change in reference group's attitudes,

• is not necessarily mediated through interpersonal dialogue
• does not directly translate into positive behaviour
• associated with reported change in personal attitudes
  
  • Reciprocal association:
    
    change in own attitude --> perception of change in social norm

Within a 9-month period, reported change in subjective norm and reported change in personal attitude:

• 32.8% of respondents who had perceived their communities attitudes on whether people with AIDS should be moved away to change negatively, reported a negative change on their own attitudes in this regard, compared to 1.9% who had perceived no change in their communities' attitudes and 1.2% who had perceived a positive change in their communities' attitude (p 0.001).
• 38.1% of respondents who perceived their friends' attitudes on whether a man is right in expecting sex without a condom to have changed positively, reported an attitudinal change in the same direction on the same issue, compared to 11.3% of respondents who had perceived no change in their friends attitudes, and 1.4% who had perceived their friends' attitudes to change negatively on this item (p 0.001).

Implications for Evaluation approaches with similar objectives

• Complex design (and cumbersome)
• Resources-intensive (financial and research capacity)
• Comprehensive
• Multi-methodology design and triangulation (to a large degree)
• But streamline within studies
• And reduce under-utilized overlap between studies
• Creative Tension: detail (per theme and per intervention component) vs pragmatically optimal