Documentary Series Narration
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Vocal Characteristics
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (US West Coast - California, Portland)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Is television, good or bad for you. Economist Iliana La Ferrara has approached the TV debate from a different perspective with astonishing results. The power of edutainment has become a big part of her research. What I do with my work is about the use of television as a way of conveying messages that could be educational. So hence the word edutainment, we try to exploit the immediate reach that this means of communication has especially towards populations with low literacy levels, engaging individuals on an emotional level might make the messages easier to absorb. In the early days of her work, La Ferrara analyzed soap operas from Brazil in the 19 sixties. Though those TV programs hadn't been designed to be educational, the portrayal of female character had a profound impact on family planning and fertility rates. The family size of characters in those novellas was very small and women were either childless or had maybe one child. I showed quite dramatic impact on fertility rates, meaning that in cities that started receiving the these type of programs, fertility rates would start dropping the year immediately after the entry of these TV. So this suggests that there was a connection in the sense that people saw relatively well off and happy families on the screen and somehow decided that by decreasing their own family size, they might improve their living conditions. So that was the initial approach I had to take programs as they existed and study the effect. More recently, I have worked with those who produce programs to embed messages in this TV series. There is a fine balance between overloading the program with educational content and providing something that's non educational at all. One study that I've done in Nigeria recently tries to assess the potential these entertainment media for HIV prevention. We screened versions of these series across communities and then compared opinions and behaviors of people exposed to the educational TV series with those not exposed. And we actually found that not only their knowledge of prevention and treatment for HIV had improved, but we saw a reduction in current partnerships. We saw an increase in testing rates quite dramatic and a decrease in STD S for women. This suggests that even on deep seated preferences like those related to sexual behavior, um these type of programs can potentially work in developing countries. The tainment approach has been enthusiastically adopted as an opportunity to tackle issues that might be harmful to society. La Ferrara believes that while this is currently predominantly initiated and funded by NGO S, it may extend to commercial TV productions and other forms of advertising, it's not very easy to assess long term effects. But I think it's an important question whether you need to keep producing these type of programs. Uh and at what frequency people should be exposed, all of these uh design type of questions are not yet answered with the evidence we got so far.