The role of media literacy and pro-health entertainment programs in changing adolescents' perceptions of alcohol and alcohol advertising

Yi-Chun Chen

doi:10.7273/000005887

With an increasing attention to entertainment-education in its applicability to health promotion in the U.S., children educated in more than two decades of media literacy movements might have a seemingly different perspective toward the media. One burning question of whether we should teach children and adolescents to critically examine media messages and forgo the potentially artistic or educational values of the media needs to be addressed. With a mixture of positive and negative alcohol messages in the media, can media literacy and pro-health entertainment work together in the context of alcohol prevention education? Experiment 1 examined the implications of a critical and a balanced approach to media literacy and found that adolescent boys and girls had different degrees of receptiveness to the instructional perspectives. A critical media literacy lesson made adolescent boys think characters on television as less realistic and believe that drinking alcohol had negative consequences. Adolescent girls benefited from a balanced evaluative approach as their media skepticism attitude was enhanced. Evaluative approaches also impacted adolescents' interpretations of pro-health entertainment programs. Adolescent boys continuously gained the most from a critical perspective as they trusted the alcohol misuse consequences depicted in the shows and in fact had a heightened level of media skepticism, which was not immediately observable after receiving the media education. The balanced media evaluative approach helped adolescent girls' think twice about the media as they still had a significant level of media skepticism. Experiment 2, employing a simplified media education that only focused on television programs, found that a positive evaluative approach to media literacy increased adolescents' media skepticism and it also had crucial influences on other key decisionmaking process. Overall, different evaluative approaches to media literacy were found to have varying degree of effectiveness and ineffectiveness on adolescent boys' and girls' interpretation of alcohol and pro-health entertainment programs. Media literacy advocates are challenged to explore what defines media literacy. Systematic evaluations of media literacy concerning adolescents' sex, learning styles, and cognitive needs should be provided to enhance our understanding of the implications media education has on adolescents' health decision-making with regard to alcohol.

The role of media literacy and pro-health entertainment programs in changing adolescents' perceptions of alcohol and alcohol advertising

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