Narratives in Health Communication

In this chapter, we describe the uses and outcomes of engaging with narratives (stories) in health communication. Narratives typically describe a series of events. They include characters, a temporal flow (events taking place over time), and causality (events linked in a cause-and-effect sequence). We begin by differentiating narratives from other forms of health communication, and briefly discussing different types of narratives, ranging from personal testimonials to entertainment-education. We highlight the fact that even fictional narratives can convey health information. We then describe the psychological processes that individuals experience when reading or watching narratives. Specifically, we focus on narrative engagement processes such as transportation into narrative worlds and identification with characters, including the factors that make individuals more likely to become engaged. We provide a summary of the empirical evidence on narrative health persuasion, drawing on recent meta-analyses and including comparisons of narratives across media and comparisons of narrative and non-narrative communication. We summarize lessons from this work on how to design effective narrative health messages. Lastly, the chapter highlights current and future directions in health narrative research.