Beyond the ivory tower to the silver screen: promoting positive development in children and adolescents through outreach to content creators

Entertainment media is an important medium for affecting adolescents development. Adolescents consume entertainment media at increasingly high rates, and it can have an immense impact on viewers. In order to maximize the power of storytelling to positively impact adolescents' moral and character development, it is important for experts in adolescent development and entertainment industry professionals to work together. Although there have already been collaborations among media professionals and scholars, we argue that we need to go beyond one-off reports and short-term collaborations to build an infrastructure that breaks through the traditional barriers that have hindered long-term collaborations. These barriers include working in isolation, institutional norms & expectations, and access & academic literacy. This article reviews potential solutions to these barriers based on experiences at the Center for Scholars & Storytellers and encourages academics to prioritize building important collaborations that strengthen the research-to-practitioner pipeline and promote positive youth development through media.