Abstract:
This study explores the impact of narrative format and target race on college students' attitudes towards people in poverty. Previous research designed to educate people about marginalized populations has utilized different mediums such as live instruction, television, and written narratives, and has examined whether participants' empathetic and/or compassionate responses are influenced by these approaches. This research has revealed the importance and the impact of the format, presentation, and content of intervention materials on participant responses to different social groups, which provides a blueprint for how to create attitude change. However, these methods have not been used to examine race and poverty as central themes of analysis. The current study uses a pre-test post-test 2 (Narrative Format: Personal or Impersonal) x 3 (Target Race: White, Black, or Asian) design to measure the effectiveness of transportation to elicit attitude change about people in poverty and whether the amount of attitude change differs by race of the person in poverty.
