Narrative Intervention in Behavior and Public Health

Abstract

Public health interventions using narratives, or stories, as a means for encouraging behavior change are common, especially in the developing world. Entertainment-education (EE) is perhaps the most widely researched form of such “narrative intervention,” but many other kinds of interventions, or parts of interventions, rely on stories to convey information about behavior risk and to model risk avoidance. Although narrative interventions are often grounded in social-cognitive theory and in commonsense assumptions about the power of storytelling, they are generally undertaken without much regard for the philosophical and cognitive bases for narrative about which much has been written. Many aspects of narrative intervention in behavior and public health could be better understood in light this literature. These include the 1) challenges inherent in creating and building on a discourse around behavior change in non-Western contexts; 2) current emphasis in public health on production rather than reception and the fundamental problem of interpretation; 3) differences between messaging versus providing an alternative worldview, and finally; 4) issues surrounding the appropriate approach to the evaluation of a narrative intervention.