The strange effect that soap operas have had in Brazil’s demography
It is evident, by pure common sense, that the most widespread pieces of popular culture can impact tremendously on the behavior of large masses of recipients. Songs of pop artists, ultrataquilla films or literary best-sellers can create fashions, modify customs, generate trends. And among those strong molders of public behavior, few are as strong as television. And within television, contests, news, Talk Shows, realities And yes, soap operas. Telenovelas change people. A couple of studies, ‘Soap Opeas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil‘(‘ Culebrones and fertility: tests from Brazil ‘) and’Television and Divorce: Evidence from Brazilian novels‘(Television and divorce: Tests from Brazilian soap operas’) analyze the impact of snakes on different aspects of the personal life of their spectators. Specifically, these programs have made fertility rates fall (more than 60% from the seventies) and multiply divorces (five times more from the eighties) in recent decades. The fault is from TV. And in the meantime, the number of families owned by television devices have multiplied: by ten, specifically, currently reaching 80% of the country’s homes. Of course, the figures of all this are not necessarily linked directly, but as the studies explain, “the authorities of these countries often have difficulty educating the population in social social and public health matters, due to The high illiteracy rates and the limited circulation of newspapers and Internet access. ” That is, the influence of television on a population with high illiteracy indices is unquestionable. The role of Globe Rede. Both studies emphasize the importation of the growth of Globe linethe most important media group in the country and the fourth largest commercial network in the world. In the nineties, 98%grew, reaching 17.9 million homes when in the mid -sixties, it still did not exist. It is to this expansion to which these complete studies allude, using demographic data related to the increasingly widespread television signal and the unstoppable growth of snakes as a favorite genre in Brazil. How the study was done. The fact that the expansion of Globe is so well documented over the years allows us to contrast with demographic data to put in relation, for example, birth rates with television expansion. It was thus detected that fertility and birth figures were lower in Brazil areas covered by Rede Globo. In fact, these studies calculate the specific percentage: the probability that women in areas covered by the television signal would become pregnant decreased a 0’6. Similarly, and this data is defining, there are no differences in fertility rates in different areas of the country before the arrival of television. The descents of fertility rates were accentuated in years after the issuance of series where social mobility of women was represented. What is seen on television. The soap operas (who see from sixty to eighty million Brazilians regularly) put the viewers in contact with a very specific family model: small, white, well economically positioned, urban (the plots are usually developed in large cities such as river of Janeiro and São Paulo) and consumerist. According to Alberto Chong, economist and co -author of both studies, “the constant exhibition to smaller and less recharged families that television shows may have created a preference for having less children.” That is, the novels present a more desirable family model, and that models the behavior of women, in the image and likeness of what they see in the “novels”, as the snakes are called there. Other data. The studies have analyzed 115 snakes (such as ‘Vale Tudo’ or ‘Dancing Days’) issued between 1965 and 1999 during maximum audience. Studies have counted that in series, 62% of female characters have no children, and 21%, only one, which undoubtedly also supports the theories of these studies. And as an anecdote, there is influence, of course, in the choice of names of children: the probability that the 20 most popular names in an area that received the globe signal included one or more characters names from a series of that year was 33%. In Xataka | The softer of image of your TV is your worst enemy: maybe you should calibrate your TV
