The Caixa de Pandora Game: Changing Behaviors and Attitudes toward Violence against Women

This article presents the development issues and evaluation results of a serious game called Caixa de Pandora (Pandora's Box, in English), developed to train health professionals to care for women in situations of domestic violence. The combat of violence against women in the health sector presupposes a change of attitudes with respect to identified cases, with the exclusion of discriminatory and oppressive practices on the part of care professionals. To change these behaviors and verify postures, Caixa de Pandora uses an approach focused on the affective domain of learning. In the same sense of verifying and guiding changes in behavior, the intelligence module of the game used a model based on psychometric principles in its design. The validation of the game by a statistical sample with health professionals identified changes in their conceptions about the subject after playing the game, thereby demonstrating its pedagogical potential to formulate new knowledge and to change behavior.