Thesis (BA Communication Arts) -- University of the Philippines Mindanao, May 2016

Participatory communication has been used in many program that forward social-change. This method challenged the ususal ?communicator-receiver? approach by including ?recepient commnunities? in planning their own development. This thesis tests the effectiveness of this method in educating female adolescents against the rampant belief of rape-myths in society. From a state university in Davao del Sur, 60 female adolescent were randomly picked as participants of a quasi-experimentation that tests their beliefs in gender roles and acceptance of rape-myths. Two types of treatment were employed to see if there were significant differences in the participants? pre-test and post-test results. Treatment 1 is composed of viewing three rape-scenarios which were crafted to showcase seven types of rape-myths and a guided-process learning used to discuss the presented rape scenarios. Using Wilcox on Signed Rank test and Mann Whitney U test, the result show that participants exposed to Treatment 1 have higher rape-myth acceptance in their post-test, while the participants exposed to treatment 2 have significantly lower rape-myth acceptance in their post-test. This indicates that the method of participatory communication reinforced some of the participants? already believed rape-myths, such as rape-victims are to be blamed with what happened to them (?she asked for it?) and rape happens in particular cases such as when women go out alone at night (?rape is a deviant event?). This study presents the strengths and weaknesses of using participatory communication as a method in addressing social issues that are culturally embedded such as the belief in rape-myths.