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Exploring Empathy and Compassion Using Digital Narratives
Sponsor: McGill University
Summary
Stories of suffering and struggle are shared continuously through digital formats such as internet videos, news stories, social marketing, and fundraising campaigns. Digital stories are often created and shared to generate awareness about a problem, impart knowledge on contemporary issues, or promote compassion. The practice of sharing critical life events and insights provided by these experiences are valuable for tellers and the listeners alike for catharsis, healing, reconciliation, and connectiveness. Portrayals of mental suffering are a matter of cultural and social interest as new media products become available to the public. Studies published since the 1990s overwhelmingly conclude that formal media depictions are biased, promoting the stereotype that people who suffer emotionally are mentally ill, dangerous, violent, or insane. Various agencies, organizations, and corporations are actively working to provide alternative stories/narratives to mainstream media by means of video testimonials in social marketing and fundraising campaigns and, ultimately, by taking advantage of the Internet. The impact of this work is under-researched. However, preliminary evaluations of social marketing campaigns report mixed results and raise questions about their effectiveness. As well, the first-person narrative prepared digitally and shared online is also providing alternative narratives to mainstream media stories. People are increasingly using digital videos to share their stories, viewing this as an opportunity to understand their emotions and thoughts, come to terms with disgrace around sensitive, personal issues and marginalization while providing hope and encouragement to others. This proposed study focuses on the process of creating digital narratives/stories, especially stories of mental and emotional suffering, and their impact in terms of inciting empathy, compassion, and good citizenship among viewers.
Official title: Learning to Care: Exploring Empathy and Compassion Using Digital Narratives
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
18 Years - 35 Years
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
80
Start Date
2024-04-01
Completion Date
2024-12-30
Last Updated
2024-07-29
Healthy Volunteers
Yes
Interventions
Digital storytelling group
Participants (intervention- group 1) will watch digital stories, short videos describing the experience of recovering from mental illness created as part of this project. Participants in the control group (group 2) will watch social marketing and/or fundraising campaigns on similar topics and complete a few questionnaires. The following standardized scales will be used: The Level of Familiarity Scale (LOF) (which will be used only before exposure to movies); Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (16 items; internal consistency coefficient .79; test-retest reliability coefficient .73), Compassionate Love Scale (21 items; Cronbach's alpha: .95; item-to-total correlations ranging from .46 to .81), Dispositional Positive Emotions Scale (DPES) (5 items; Cronbach's alpha for the compassion subscale: .80; inter-scale correlations: .44), Self-Stigma of Mental Illness Scale-Short Form (SSMIS-SF) (20 items; Cronbach's alpha: 0.91); Difference and Disdain Scales for Public Stigma (DDSPS) (9 items).
Social marketing/fundraising group
Participants will be randomly assigned to the social marketing/fundraising group (n = 40 participants; 20 Anglophone and 20 Francophone; ages 18-35). Participants will be asked to watch twenty-six social marketing/fundraising videos which will be assessed using a between-subjects design.
Locations (1)
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada