On the cellphone soap opera set, in Jersey City. (photo Frank Lopez)

NEW YORK, NY February 13, 2009 —If all goes according to plan, the day is coming when you can open your video-enabled cellphone and dive into some high drama.

Girl, you are pregnant! What are you gonna do?

A Rutgers University researcher is developing a public health soap opera, with federal funding. She hopes the cellphone series will make the case for condoms more effectively than hum-drum public service announcements delivered by broadcast, print and billboards. WNYC’s Fred Mogul has this report.

REPORTER: Tony and Mike have been together for years. But Mike starts stepping out with Valerie, and it isn’t long before Valerie has some news.

Hey, baby, guess what -- I’m pregnant!

REPORTER: Depending on your fondness for soap operas, the plot and dialogue will either be familiar or a bit much.

I’m keeping it. It’s YOURS!

REPORTER: But this isn’t just regular daytime fare.

Phillip’s just not the guy I thought he was.

REPORTER: And it’s clearly not the sex ed drama your mom and dad grew up with.

I’ve got some sorta sore – down there.

REPORTER: Even if the main ‘takeaway’ is what it’s been for years.

Keep something between yourself and the germs of venereal disease by using a good rubber.

REPORTER: The producers of the new 21 century sex ed soap operas say their message and their stories are rooted in the ‘real world,’ in a way earlier generations never were.

I had to give your name to the clinic as one of my sexual partners. My HIV test came back positive.

MOORE: There were several focus groups so I didn’t need to pull from out of a hat or any thing.

REPORTER: Martinique Moore is a production assistant for the as-yet-unnamed soap opera

MOORE: For example, a lot of issues were comin up ‘My man is cheatin on me, and I know he is.’ So we kinda took that, and began to script the scenario.

REPORTER: Moore works for Rachel Jones, a registered nurse-Ph.D at the Rutgers College of Nursing. It was Jones who came up with the idea for cellphone soaps operas. She has worked with AIDS patients since the epidemic began and watched countless people die. Jones got into public information campaigning, because she’s disturbed that many women behave as if AIDS is no longer deadly.

JONES: In my studies, wherever we went, women were saying the same things: to get a man and hold onto a man unprotected sex is what’s expected.

REPORTER: Jones produced a 45-minute pilot version of the cellphone soap, which is set in Newark and Jersey City. Several dozen women who viewed it when it came out in 2005 were enthusiastic. Jones eventually won a 2 million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to expand the program. That doesn’t mean developing and distributing cellphone soaps nation-wide. Not just yet. The current grant is only to study the effects of the show on a larger group. So, Jones and her team will give 250 women video-capable cellphones, and show them twelve 15-minute episodes over several months -- and then ask them if they’re changing their behavior.

JONES: We need to get at the sort of difficult relationship pressures to engage in unprotected sex. . . instead of having the condom symbolize lack of trust – ‘Baby, why you askin me to use a condom now? We been together five years’ -- What we want to do is, through popular soap opera formats, to show that, you know, ‘The condom shows I care.’

REPORTER: But if these women are already LIVING these stories that are all around them, what will the soaps tell them that they don’t already know about using condoms? Jones is inspired by a movement called entertainment education, which she says has successfully helped change various social norms around the world – encouraging birth control and decreasing domestic violence in some areas where women have few rights.

JONES: We want to put our foot in the door of multimedia and start taking the everyday lives of women and men and showing their potentials as a way to reduce HIV-AIDS risk.

REPORTER: The New York City Health Department for almost a decade ran an AIDS prevention soap opera of its own for much of the 1990s – about a couple named Julio and Marisol. It was a series of cartoons, based on Latino photo-novellas, that ran on the subway. The Health Department’s Jeffrey Escoffier says people still recall Julio and Marisol fondly. But he says the department’s more recent campaigns have taken a different turn.

ESCOFFIER: People expect us to provide factual information, so we try to do that. Some of the drama that we do have comes from the fact that we use real-life people, giving testimonials.

REPORTER: Testimonials like those of cigarette smokers Renaldo, who speaks with a voice box, and Marie, whose poster shows her holding up a hand with amputated fingers.

ESCOFFIER: It’s a little harder when you do something that’s fictional, because then how it’s interpreted and how it conveys feelings and blame and things like that become more complicated and harder to deal with.

REPORTER: There’s no data on how many people Julio and Marisol, in their prime, persuaded to use condoms. The cause-and-effect influence of ad campaigns is always difficult to gauge, whether its amputee smokers trying to get you to quit or talking babies trying to sell you an online brokerage account. Rutgers Researcher Rachel Jones is confident that the impact of her soap operas will be measurable, whether its high impact or low impact.

What are you doing? Baby, you know the deal – no glove, no love.

REPORTER: Jones’ team will be interviewing the cellphone audience, while they’re watching the series and then three and six month later. She says she believes participants will answer questions honestly about whether or not they’re using condoms.

JONES: We have ways of telling, by asking the same question in different ways, that the answers are honest and truthful … We also have our interview on the computer so that by not having to discuss your behaviors with a human being we find that the yield of truthful answers is much higher.

REPORTER: Jones’ study won’t follow participants beyond 6 months. And while the computerized interviews will ask them if they contracted HIV-AIDS or other diseases, no one will give them blood tests to verify their answers. That will have to be another study for another day.