Research in Progress: Millions struggle with period poverty. How might media messaging change that?

By Yin Yang Ph.D. student, and Chris Skurka, assistant professor, Penn State

Period poverty refers to a lack of access to menstrual products, hygiene facilities and adequate education. Globally, around 500 million individuals experience period poverty each month. For those who menstruate and live in the least developed countries, basic menstrual products may be unaffordable.

As a result, they use alternative materials to manage their period, such as rags and paper towels. This practice, however, poses a threat to people’s health, dignity and quality of life. In some countries, women are likely to skip school or work due to the difficulty in managing their menstruation.

In light of these facts, a number of organizations around the world – especially nonprofit organizations – are striving to combat period poverty. To better achieve their goals, these organizations often call for support through websites and social media platforms. However, little is known about how media messages of combating period poverty can be more effective.

Our Page Center-funded project focuses on a specific message format (i.e. narratives or stories) as a promising messaging strategy to shift the public’s perception of the importance of the issue. It also examines the message’s support for policies that can combat period poverty and their behavioral outcomes (intentions to share the message, talk about the issue with others, donate, and sign a petition, as well as actual information seeking behavior).

Narratives have been found to be especially effective in raising awareness and changing attitudes/behaviors about social issues. Reading a story may induce certain emotional responses, reduce resistance to the ideas presented, and increase audience engagement in the story. These mechanisms, therefore, will also be examined in the present investigation.

Moreover, our study compares the effects of narratives told from a first- vs. a third-person point of view. Prior research in narrative persuasion has come to different conclusions about the relative effectiveness of first- vs. third-person stories, so to reconcile these findings, it is important to investigate the boundary conditions under which one point of view is superior to the other.

We focus on group membership as a potential moderating factor. Specifically, a third-person point of view may be more effective than a first-person point of view when group membership is salient and the main character in a narrative message is perceived as a stigmatized outgroup member. The underlying rationale is that when a character is perceived as a stigmatized outgroup member, readers tend to psychologically distance themselves from the character.

The third-person point of view, compared to the first-person point of view, is more likely to make the psychological distancing happen. In this case, the first-person point of view is undesirable, which may reduce the persuasive effectiveness of a narrative through greater resistance and lower narrative engagement. The current study provides a suitable context to test this line of thought, because individuals who menstruate may encounter period stigma and menstruation-related issues make the group membership (i.e., womanhood) salient.

Therefore, we will conduct a between-subjects experiment including four conditions (no message vs. non-narrative message vs. first-person narrative vs. third-person narrative). Participants will be randomly assigned one of the four conditions. Their gender identity will be measured and treated as a moderator. The messages that participants will read feature a young woman’s experience of period poverty (adapted from a real-existing news story). Participants’ emotional responses (compassion, sadness, disgust, anger), narrative engagement (identification, transportation, empathy), reactance (counterarguing, freedom threat perception), perceived issue salience, policy support, and behavioral outcomes will be assessed.

The proposed study will make both theoretical and practical implications. At the theoretical level, findings can add to the narrative persuasion literature by considering the role of group membership in enhancing or attenuating the impact of narrative point of view. Practically, this research sheds light on messaging strategies for professionals who work to combat period poverty. We hope that this study will inspire more scholarly attention to public communication from nonprofit organizations addressing stigmatized and understudied issues. We look forward to conducting the study and sharing our findings in the near future.

This project was funded by the Page Center as part of a program that supports scholarly work by graduate students.