Testing the effectiveness of a skin cancer narrative in promoting positive health behavior: A pilot study Marijke Lemal ⁎, Jan Van den Bulck Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium abstract article info Available online 4 May 2010 Keywords: Skin cancer Narratives Health promotion Information seeking Behavior Objective. The aim of this experiment was to examine the differential impact of a narrative and a non- narrative skin cancer message on health promoting actions and information-seeking behaviors. Methods. Participants were 230 Flemish university students aged 18 to 25 years who participated in a web based experiment in February 2009. Students were randomly assigned to a narrative skin cancer message, a non-narrative message or a no-message control condition. The messages contained identical information about recommended actions to prevent or detect skin cancer. Four weeks after exposure to the stimuli, respondents received a questionnaire assessing their actual health behaviors. Results. Multinomial logistic regression results indicated that participants who had been exposed to the narrative message were two to four times more likely to have engaged in health promoting actions, compared to participants in the control group. In contrast, the impact of the non-narrative condition only differed from that of the control group for searching more information about skin cancer. Conclusions. These findings suggest that narrative messages may be a powerful means for promoting positive health actions. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Health communication designed to promote cancer prevention and detection traditionally has appealed to logical reasoning by providing statistical evidence, rational arguments and factual infor- mation. Recently, narrative forms of communication, such as messages showing emotionally interesting exemplars or personal testimonies and television entertainment stories are emerging as a powerful means to affect several cancer-related outcomes (Green, 2006; Hinyard and Kreuter, 2007; Kreuter et al., 2007). Narrative messages are generally defined as concrete, appealing, absorbing, emotionally interesting and image-evoking cohesive and coherent stories. An example of a narrative would be a personal account of an individual's experience with cancer. In contrast, non-narrative or logical appealing messages are conceptualized as abstract, non-vivid, general messages which use logical reasoning and depict factual information. For example: “The number of individuals being diag- nosed with cancer is each year is 10,000”.(Greene and Brinn, 2003; Green, 2006; de Wit et al., 2008; Kreuter et al., 2007; Hinyard and Kreuter, 2007). Research has linked exposure to cancer narratives to increased knowledge about cancer (Brodie et al., 2001), positive attitudes toward protective health behaviors (Valente et al., 2007) and intentions to perform protective actions (Morman, 2000). However, few studies have evaluated the impact of story based communication about cancer on actual positive health behaviors. Research on the effects of media narratives about Australian singer Kylie Minogue's breast cancer diagnosis found a 40% increase in mammography screening bookings during the two weeks of publicity (Chapman et al., 2005). Results from an evaluation of the impact of a cervical cancer story line in a UK television soap opera showed a large increase in the number of cervical smears in the weeks following the broadcast (Howe et al., 2002). Greene and Brinn (2003), however, compared the effects of message evidence formats and concluded that there were no differences between the impact of a statistical/rational and a narrative message about the risk of skin cancer on intentions to decrease tanning bed use and on changes in actual tanning behavior assessed four weeks after the experiment. Further, whereas most research on health narratives and protec- tive actions has focused on disease preventing behaviors, little attention has been paid to information-seeking actions (Rimal and Real, 2003). There is evidence that information-seeking of health related topics may be an important health promoting action, because it may lead to better knowledge and ultimately to enhancing other health behaviors (Rimal et al., 1999; Dutta-Bergman, 2005; Shim et al., 2006). Moreover, because health messages can only deliver a limited amount of health information to an undifferentiated target audience, individual information seeking may be an important health outcome. Preventive Medicine 51 (2010) 178–181 ⁎ Corresponding author. Faculty of Social Sciences, School for Mass Communication Research, Parkstraat 45 Box 3603 BE-3000 Leuven, Belgium. Fax: +32 16323312. E-mail address: marijke.lemal@soc.kuleuven.be (M. Lemal). 0091-7435/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2010.04.019 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Preventive Medicine journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ypmed