Virtual Learning about Alcohol through Narrative Transportation into Television Episodes

This research focuses on the health implications of immersing oneself into a virtual story, in our case, a fictional television episode. We pursue this research question in the context of a major public health problem: under-age drinking. Social policy research has established that depictions of alcohol and storylines that revolve around drinking are common in popular culture forms directed at a youthful audience. Alcohol consumption shows up in music lyrics and in music videos, and across a wide variety of movie and television genres (Dal Cin et al. 2008; Gunasekera, Chapman and Campbell 2005; Gruber et al. 2005; Russell and Russell 2009; Sargent et al. 2005; Sargent, Tanski, and Gibson 2007). In turn, exposure to media programming that features alcohol has been implicated as a causal factor in alcohol use and abuse by teens. The presentation reports the findings of an experimental program funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) concerning the impact on teens of alcohol-related narratives. We constructed TV episodes to present these narratives. The episodes feature fictional characters’ “virtual lives” whose experiences with alcohol could, based on narrative transportation (NT) theory, alter teen viewers’ own beliefs about real life drinking and its consequences (Green and Brock 2000). The premise of NT theory is that transportation into the virtual world of the story causes dispositions to shift in a direction consistent with the story world (Gerrig 1993). So, if the story shows teenagers having fun drinking alcohol, and the teenage viewer is transported into that story, then that viewer’s beliefs about the consequences of consuming alcohol should shift in the direction of perceiving more positive outcomes. Conversely, if the story shows realistic negative outcomes of alcohol, then a transported teen’s dispositions toward alcohol should accordingly shift in a more negative direction. Because transportation into the story is usually induced through identification with the virtual characters that populate it, character identification is also a likely driver of the persuasiveness of the messages contained in the story.