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Examines the local reception of global Spanish-language soap operas, or telenovelas. Explores how young people talked about Mexican telenovelas in daily life. Concludes that the telenovela, within certain limits, reflected some of the national, ethnic, gender, and class tensions that defined the viewers' identities as working-class, Mexican American girls. (SG)

Interviews with Latinos in the Northeast and the Southwest found that they watched Spanish-language soap operas (telenovelas) as a way of maintaining family ties and Hispanic culture, while watching American soap operas provided information about U.S. society and behavioral norms as well as opportunities to learn English. (Contains 21 references.) (SV)

Examines the impact of background media on Dutch students' performance and time spent on paper-and-pencil and memorization homework assignments. Notes that doing homework combined with watching a soap opera interfered with students' performance on both types of assignments. Indicates that music in the background left homework performance unaffected. Finds no indication that background media influenced the amount of time spent to complete homework assignments. (PM)

Offers examples of dramatic experiences (student produced soap operas) in two classrooms in British comprehensive secondary schools. Concludes that students in other countries would find such experiences as meaningful and enjoyable as their British counterparts. Notes that the two teachers managed to be flexible, appropriating effective instructional time to mandated curriculum yet interweaving innovative classroom experiences and effective classroom practices. (SG)

Explores processes of social change initiated by an entertainment-education radio soap opera by studying its effects in an observational case study in one rural village in India. Investigates the paradoxes, contradictions, and audience members' struggles in the process of media-stimulated change, a process involving parasocial interaction, peer communication, and collective efficacy. (SR)

Examines how young girls in a multi-aged primary classroom constructed gendered identities and meanings through interactions with books and televised soap operas that often distort their vision of reality and what it is to live as a female. Discovers that the girls interpreted story to make it fit into their already established ideas about appropriate behavior for females. (SR)

Hypothesizes that instrumental media motivation, selectivity, attention, and involvement are positive predictors of satisfaction, parasocial interaction, and cultivation effects from watching daytime television serials; avoidance, distraction, and skepticism were seen as negative predictors. Finds support for these expectations through three path analyses. Suggests such variations in audience activity help explain how/why people respond differently to media messages. (PA)

Finds that soap operas analyzed in 1994 contain more frequent sexual incidence on an hourly average, both within the same soaps analyzed a decade earlier and even more so on two additional very popular soaps. Shows that the more frequent sex centers on physical intercourse, primarily among partners not married to anyone; and sexual activity is visual as well as verbal. (SR)

Investigates the effects of India's first long-running television soap opera that was designed to promote women's status in Indian society. Finds that exposure to the program was positively associated with viewers' involvement with the characters in the program and with viewer's television dependency, but did not make viewers more aware of women's status issues. (SR)

Studies sexual morality in one year of programing of the soap opera "All My Children." Reconceptualizes definitions of inappropriate sexual behavior to deemphasize marital status. Examines use of force in sexual contact. Finds that men, often heroes, engage in and are rewarded for aggressive sexual behavior in spite of women's protests. Notes inconsistencies in treatment of AIDS issues. (SR)

Examines television viewers' interpretations of a particular narrative from the British soap opera "Coronation Street" after they had watched it unfold over some time in natural viewing circumstances. Identifies and discusses the interpretations of four clusters of viewers ranked in terms of their relative allegiance to the characters. (KEH)

Describes two studies that examined how chronic loneliness influenced local news and soap opera viewing by nontraditional and traditional college students. The relationships between loneliness, media use, and interpersonal interaction are discussed, and discriminant analyses are presented that examined viewers' motives, attitudes, and activities while watching television. (61 references) (LRW)

Examined the triggering effect of maritally related suicide stories in the mass media on monthly suicide rates of those involved in divorce or in marital distress. Support was found for this effect, independent of season and of changes in unemployment, but the unemployment rate was more closely associated with suicide than suicide stories in the media. (Author/TE)

Explores the relationship among media consumers, institutional economics, and cultural ethos and suggests that communication researchers must adopt a flexible methodology capable of considering all relevant forces. Uses the case of Norway's broadcasting of the U.S. television series "Dynasty" to help illustrate these premises. (MG)

A family literacy program used television soap operas as a starting point for investigating home and community literacy practices. Parents participated as co-researchers, comparing media portrayals of literacy events with their own everyday practices. (SK)

AbstractBackgroundMethodsResultsConclusionExposure to tobacco and alcohol on-screen promotes use and despite regulations and policies to limit impact, these behaviours remain common. We report a longitudinal analysis of tobacco, e-cigarette and alcohol content in three popular UK television soap operas, to examine changing social norms between 2002 and 2022.We used one-minute interval coding to measure content in programmes in two one-week periods in three years (2002, 2012 and 2022). Change in the probability of actual and implied use of tobacco, e-cigarette and alcohol over time was examined using logistic regression.We coded 2505 intervals from 78 episodes. Tobacco content occurred in 22% of episodes and significantly decreased from 2002 to 2022 (OR 0.15 95% CI 0.06–0.40). Tobacco use changed over time with decreasing use indoors and increasing use outdoors. No e-cigarette use was identified. Alcohol content was found in 88% of episodes and while it also significantly decreased over time (OR 0.78 95% CI 0.61–0.99) it featured in 20% of broadcast minutes in 2022. Alcohol use in homes increased over time.While tobacco imagery is increasingly rare in these three UK soap operas, alcohol content has remained common. Tightening the UK Ofcom regulations would help to reduce young people’s exposure to these harmful behaviours and their potential influence on social norms now and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the intersections of Taiwanese soap operas and foreign policy in Latin America, the one area of the world where Taiwan has retained some degree of formal diplomatic recognition despite the pressures of China. Yet has the decline in official Taiwanese power even in this region been compensated by a new kind of cultural power? The distribution of Taiwanese soap operas dubbed into Spanish from the mid-2010s to the early 2020s marks the first time that Taiwan tried to cultivate favor among Latin American publics at large. This was an explicitly diplomatic maneuver. But was it perceived as such by soap opera viewers in the Spanish-speaking Americas? When and how did Taiwanese soap opera diplomacy begin in Latin America, why did it apparently end, and did it ultimately work? Approximately eighty newspaper articles in Spanish from a wide range of countries across the Americas, plus corresponding visual and audiovisual materials online, furnish the basis of this study. The totality of media reports suggests that the pop culture strategy of Taiwanese foreign policy that was carried out in Latin America, though diplomatically unproductive in a material sense, was worth undertaking all the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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