Narrative and frame in health communication: the influence of narrative transportation to promote detection behavior

Abstract

The purpose of thesis is to test two types of persuasive message strategies including narrative message type and message frame in health context and to investigate the potential interplay of those strategies when health message contain multiple persuasive strategies that combine various categories (e.g., gain-framed narrative message or loss-framed statistical evidence). In fact, the combination of strategies seems likely to intensify or diminish the effect of health message on persuasion. The results are congruent with the transportation theory. Narrative message produces higher transportation experience into the message than statistical evidence, and higher transportation yields positive attitude and intention toward skin cancer detection behaviors than low transportation. Moreover, the results also indicate that loss frame elicits no effect on attitude and intention toward skin cancer detection behaviors compared to gain frame. The findings support the meta-analyses of message frame literature, arguing that loss frame is only effective in promoting breast cancer detection behavior but not for other detection behaviors such as HIV test and blood test. This study is also designed to explore the possible moderating role of transportation in different message frame. It hypothesizes that for highly transported participants, loss frame will be more effective than gain frame in promoting positive attitude and intention to engage in detection behavior. The findings show that message frame has no effect for those who highly transported people.