Is it safe? The Effect of Narrative vs. Non-narrative Messages on Story-Related Knowledge of Medicated Abortion

Judy Watts ^1* Austin Hubner ² Jun Pei ¹ Michaella Barros ¹

• ¹ University of Kansas, Lawrence, United States
• ² University of Louisville, Louisville, Colorado, United States

Despite ample evidence that narratives facilitate learning health information, little is known about how audiences learn information from entertainment narratives. A preregistered two-part between and within online experiment (time 1: n = 220; time 2: n = 125) was conducted to test whether participants gained more knowledge from an edited clip of Grey's Anatomy vs. from a medical doctor (YouTube online educator) on medicated abortion. Knowledge about medicated abortion was tested by a true/false test as well as a thought-listing procedure where participants were asked to recall facts about the video. Results from the experiment indicated that both formats were equally effective in post-test knowledge scores via the true/false test, but the nonnarrative was more effective for recall. Results further revealed that knowledge recognition appeared stable at wave 2 yet knowledge recall decayed at wave 2. Implications suggest that individuals are more likely to remember general safety and efficacy of medicated abortion regardless of video condition but less likely to remember precise information about the medication from entertainment narratives. Finally, because prior attitudes toward medicated abortion interacted with the video condition such that counter-attitudinals appeared to have higher knowledge recognition (time 2) when exposed to the narrative vs. non-narrative video, results align with the extended elaboration likelihood model and the entertainment overcoming resistance model. Narratives appear to facilitate learning about polarizing health information for those who hold unfavorable attitudes toward the topic.