Narrative Transportation in Documentary Film: How Immersion into the Documentary Film Hillbilly Affects Viewers' Attitudes

Abstract

For decades, film has relied on stereotypical misconceptions to depict Appalachian people on screen. Research has demonstrated that visual narratives and the experience of narrative transportation has the power to change individuals’ perceptions about information conveyed implicitly or explicitly within a story. Presently, no empirical research has examined how viewer attitudes form based on their level of immersion into an Appalachian documentary film. To fill this gap, this study offers a quantitative approach to examine if the documentary Hillbilly narratively transports the viewer into the world of Appalachia and shifts audience perceptions of the stereotypical Appalachian persona or “hillbilly.” The film Hillbilly takes a media-against-media approach to challenge stereotypical Appalachian misconceptions. In this study, viewer attitudes and perceptions were assessed through a field experiment following a pretest-posttest experimental design using a sample of university students (n = 57) with theoretical grounding in narrative transportation theory. Research from this study suggests that viewers changed their perceptions of Appalachian people after watching the documentary, but narrative transportation was not the driving force in this shift. To identify this shift, this study deployed a new working model that extends previous attitude models to include variables of stereotypes and perceptions. This study offers significant advances in theory surrounding how media-against-media documentaries can be used to overcome audience biases, while proving that the documentary film Hillbilly was powerful enough to shift viewers' perceptions of Appalachian people.