This project aimed to explore the perspectives of entertainment industry and health communication practitioners in the United States on creating health storylines in entertainment programming. These dual perspectives are usually not studied in tandem but together offer insights into the creation of impactful health-related narratives. In-depth interviews were conducted with entertainment industry and health professionals (N = 6) who are experienced in creating health storylines. Questions aimed to illuminate how practitioners define ‘success’ of a health storyline, what they perceive as key elements for impactful health storylines, how key story elements are created and the nature of collaboration between the entertainment industry and public health. Grounded theory analysis identified three core themes for the successful combination of narrative entertainment and health: choosing teams with complementary strengths (e.g., leveraging professional collaboration and trust), knowing your audience (e.g., conducting formative research to understand who the story is intended for and why) and integrating health content in authentic ways (e.g., telling dramatic stories with universal themes, without creating from the intent of relaying health information). Best-practice guidelines for narrative entertainment to communicate about health, informed by the core themes and persuasion theory, are offered for narrative development, pre-production, content creation and dissemination.

该项目旨在探讨美国娱乐业和健康传播从业人员在娱乐节目中创建健康故事情节的观点。通常不会一并研究这些双重观点，但可以共同提供对与健康有关的有影响力的叙述的见解。与娱乐业和卫生专业人员进行了深入访谈（N= 6）具有创建健康故事情节的经验。旨在阐明从业者如何定义健康故事情节的“成功”，他们认为哪些元素是影响健康故事情节的关键元素，如何创建关键故事元素以及娱乐行业与公共卫生之间合作的性质的问题。扎根的理论分析确定了叙事娱乐与健康成功结合的三个核心主题：选择具有互补优势的团队（例如，利用专业合作和信任），了解您的受众（例如，进行形成性研究以了解故事的意图和目标）以及为什么）并以真实的方式整合健康内容（例如，以通用主题讲述戏剧性故事，而无需出于传递健康信息的意图而创建）。