New Research Reveals the Success of Taru,
PCI’S Indian
Serial Drama
Professor Arvind Singhal of Ohio University,
along with a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Michigan
State Universities, and the Centre for Media Studies (CMS)
in New Delhi recently completed their qualitative and quantitative
evaluation study assessing the impact of the PCI radio serial
drama Taru on audience members located in the Indian state
of Bihar.
This research highlights the value added when entertainment-education
programs are strategically integrated with community-based
organizations and locally available health care services.
It further validates the impact of utilizing intensive
publicity to prime audience receptivity.
PCI’s Hindi radio serial drama began airing in February
2002 and covered some of the most poverty-stricken states
in northern India. It is estimated that the radio serial
had a listenership of between 20 to 25 million people. Taru,
the story about a 21-year-old woman who resists harmful cultural
norms and pursues further education, has inspired avid listeners
to emulate character charged with positive values. Taru was
modeled after one of Janani’s (a partner NGO that provides
reproductive health care in the Indian states of Bihar and
Madhya Pradesh) rural medical woman practitioners.
The purpose of the serial drama – while also to entertain
and educate its audience - was ultimately to motivate the
listeners to take charge of their health, seek out health
services, and improve their own lives.
The soon to be published study reveals information assessing
the following:
- Synergistic possibilities for social action that
emerge when entertainment-education radio broadcasts are
strategically
integrated with community-based organizations and locally-available
health care services
- The processes of social change initiated by an entertainment-education
radio program in India, Taru,
which lead to certain socially desirable effects in
four villages in Bihar State.
- Effects of more/less orchestration of publicity on audience
members before, during and after the broadcasts.
-
Sales of Mithun condoms, Apsara oral contraceptive pills
and pregnancy dipsticks sold by Janani’s rural
health practitioners in four research sites during the
time that Taru was
broadcast in Bihar.
- Extent to which media programs facilitate social change by
stimulating the development of social capital in communities
- The social activism dimensions of participatory theater workshops
held with 50 members of Taru listening
clubs, hailing from Abirpur Village in Vaishali
District and Kamtaul, Madhopur,
and Chandrahatti Villages in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur
District
To download and view the executive summaries
of these four quantitative reports in Adobe Acrobat format,
you can click on the links below:
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