What is Storytelling?

Storytelling is an art form that has the ability to both form and sustain relationships between those telling the story and those hearing it. Storytelling allows listeners to hear personal experiences and be moved engaged, connected, and challenged by them. Shared narratives create a sense of intimacy that can serve to bring people together and form a community (Clarke, 2010).

While stories have been told for generations, digital stories are only recently coming to the forefront of communication methods. Digital stories combine images, audio recordings of narratives told from the first person perspective, music, and text in ways that convey personal experiences to audiences (Lambert, 2010). The use of technologies in this storytelling method brings forth the opportunity to express ideas and explore communication in new ways that are easily accessible. They “make available an extensive, user-friendly multimodal toolkit who’s competent handling doesn’t require year-long specialized training” (Anderson & Macleroy). It is for this reason that many populations that previously lacked a voice can now speak up and share their experiences for audiences to hear.

In the field of Public Health, using this form of narrative intervention and storytelling to target Public Health issues can be very effective in engaging an audience, sending a message, and helping the target audience relate and draw connections to the information that is being brought forth. Additionally, digital storytelling has the ability to connect community members to one another and facilitate conversation regarding community public health issues that are of concern (Gubrium, 2009). This connection, community engagement, and spreading of information is imperative for community health reform.

On the individual level, digital storytelling allows individuals to gain a sense of ownership over their experiences as they are the ones in charge of script writing and revising, video construction, and who has the ability to see and hear their stories (Gubrium, 2009). It is because of this that digital storytelling has been seen to also increase one’s sense of accomplishment, pride, value, and self-efficacy (Gubrium et al., 2016).

Anderson, J. & Macleroy, V. (2016). Multilingual Digital Storytelling: Engaging creatively and critically with literacy. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routeledge, 2016.

Clarke, L. (2010). What I’ve Learned: Stories From Inside the Health Care Community. Storytelling, Self, Society, 6(2), 122-131. Retrieved from http://jstor.org/stable/41949125

Gubrium, A. (2009). Digital storytelling: an emergent method for health promotion research and practice. Health Promotion Practice, 10(2), 186-191. Doi: 10.1177/1524839909332600

Gubrium, A.C., Fiddian-Green, A., Lowe, S., DiFulvio, G. & Del Toro-Mejias (2016). Measuring Down: Evaluating Digital Storytelling as a Process for Narrative Health Promotion. Qualitative Health Research 26(13), 1787-1801