The Role of Different Characters on Story-Consistent Attitudes and Self-Reported Mental Health-Related Behavior Change Among Viewers of 13 Reasons Why

Public Policy Relevance Statement This study provided insight into the relationship between adolescents' and young adults' involvement with characters from 13 Reasons Why and viewers' self-reported behavior change. These findings suggest that viewers' involvement with different characters was related to a change in self-reported empathy toward others experiencing mental health issues. This work further highlights that narrative stories, even fictional stories without explicit educational goals, can create opportunities for viewers to connect, identify, and relate to characters, and this experience can shape how these viewers experience the world and intend to act toward others. This is particularly important for adolescents and young adults as their own identity and view of the world is being developed during this stage in their lives. Previous research has considered if and how entertainment-education (EE) media consumption and connections with media characters relate to viewer attitudes and behavior. The literature, however, tends to consider viewer connections to 1 main character and samples from within the global region where the series is set. Thus, we build on this literature using survey data collected from adolescents and young adult viewers (N = 1,624) of the Netflix series, 13 Reasons Why, living in 4 regions around the world. We examine the relations between viewing, involvement with different main characters, story-consistent attitudes, and self-reported mental health-related behavior change. Results demonstrate differences in relationships between viewing and self-reported behavior as a function of viewers' favorite character, indicating that viewer connections to different media characters relates to self-reported outcomes. Importantly these results were generally consistent across global regions. This suggests that EE programs can have a wide reach, but that a favorite character can relate to self-reported outcomes.