offered a choice between the value of one pack of condoms in cash, and one, two or three packs of condoms. The dependent variable takes value one if the respondent chose the condoms over the monetary amount and zero otherwise. While participants were more likely to choose condoms when the relative price was lower (i.e., when offered a higher number of packs), choice behavior did not differ among those who watched Shuga and those who did not. Results are equally insignificant for women and men (columns 3 to 6). This zero effect of treatment aligns with the results obtained in Table 3 when looking at self-reported condom use.

The absence of an effect on condom use is consistent with different possible explanations. One is that there is strong cultural resistance to condoms in the Nigerian context and Shuga was simply unable to overcome such resistance. Another is an endogenous response to safer sexual behavior by treated individuals. As the incidence of concurrent partnerships is reduced for treated individuals (see Table 3), and possibly the nature of the partners becomes safer, the reduced risk may have induced our treatment group to rely less on condoms.

An additional result consistent with the interpretation that the treatment group adopted a safer behavior comes from the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. Panel B of Table 4 shows the effect of treatment on the probability of testing positive for Chlamydia. Results are shown for the full sample, for women and for men. While the estimated effect is negative and comparable in size in all three samples, it is only statistically significant for the female subsample. This is not surprising as Chlamydia is more prevalent among women. Also, the fact that the prevalence is very low in general makes it diffi cult to detect an effect with high precision. On the other hand, the magnitude of the effect is quite sizeable relative to the baseline prevalence rate: exposure to Shuga leads to a 55 percent decrease in the likelihood that women test positive for Chlamydia. As discussed above, even in the absence of an effect on condom use, this improvement may be generated by more careful behavior on behalf of the respondent, e.g., decreasing the number of sexual partners or choosing ‘safer’partners.<sup>26</sup>

# 5.3 The role of involvement with the narrative

According to the proponents of entertainment education, a key advantage of these programs is that viewers get engaged with the narrative and this leads them to pay more attention to content, learn from characters and be less defensive against external inputs (Singhal and Rogers, 1999). To test the role played by these factors we included in our endline survey a series of questions created by communication experts to measure two key dimensions.

The first dimension is what Green and Brock (2000) call ‘transportation’, and which could be alternatively described as ‘engagement’. Individuals who are transported into the narrative of a movie tend to focus their cognitive attention on its messages and to have heightened

> 26 We tested whether, conditional on showing symptoms, treated respondents were more likely to seek treatment for STDs and found that they were not. The estimated coeffi cient on Treated is insignificant and equal to 0.019, where the mean of the dependent variable is 0.15.

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