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culties in the 1970s. Melkote (1991) writes that, “[b]y the seventies it
became increasingly clear in Asia and Latin America that socio-economic
structural constraints diminished and even eliminated the infl uence of
the mass media in overcoming problems of development” (pp. 172–173).
By the 1990s, the assumed good of development had undergone critical
interrogation (Dubois, 1991; Escobar, 1995).
Notwithstanding the problems associated with attempts to link
communication research to the goals of development, PCI’s approach
to entertainment-education owes much to this history. However, the
fundamental difference between these older attempts and PCI’s newer
programs is an emphasis on participatory communication strategies. At
the heart of these participatory strategies for development and communication
is a greater role for the populations affected by the development
process. At its most inclusive, participation means that individuals are
empowered to “contribute ideas, take initiatives, articulate their needs
and problems, and assert their autonomy” (Melkote, 1991, p. 239).
Melkote argues that more participatory development and communication
strategies opened up the possibility of adding new media options such as
“folk media” and indigenous communication channels to the traditional
mass media of television, radio, and newspapers. The use of radio and
television soap operas to convey ideas about health communication
emerged from this interaction between the more participatory discourses
on communication and development and the traditional reliance on
mass media effects research to evaluate the uptake of new values and
behaviors (Meyer, 1981; McCombie, Hornick, & Anarfi , 2002). To assess
mass communication’s role in stimulating behavioral changes, PCI relies
on Albert Bandura’s (1977) social learning theory to guide the development
of their soap operas. For Bandura behavioral changes are often
due to modeling one’s behavior on another’s behavior. Bandura’s value
to mass communication is that he expands the range of possible role
models to include characters one encounters vicariously through media
exposure. For PCI, Miguel Sabido’s research on the effi cacy of telenovela’s
for promoting family planning and development in Mexico supported
the view of soap operas as participatory media. Other organizations, such
as the Population Media Center (2004), also echo the Sabido method
for using soap operas to promote behavioral change. The popularity of
soap operas underwritten by social learning theory and their historical
success in Mexico paved the way for entertainment education to emerge
as a strategy of health communication.
While not unique, the soap opera genre has become the dominant
cultural form of entertainment-education. The rise of entertainmenteducation
as a vehicle for health communication relies on the power of