A universidade nas representações sociais de estudantes do ensino médio da cidade do Rio de Janeiro: diferenças estruturais, de implicação pessoal e de capitais

Abstract

Access to university education in Brazil is part of a broad problem that refers to the insertion of young people who finish the high school, as well as the possibilities of achievement for their future and the limits of their social place. In this sense, the present dissertation deals with the social representations of high school students of public and private schools of Rio de Janeiro city on the university by means of three studies, supported on both the structural approach of the social representations theory and the Pierre Bourdieu s theory of social fields. Study 1 aimed at identifying the possible structure of social representations on the university among students of 3rd year of high school, participating in the research 160 students, of both sexes, being 80 of private school and 80 of public school. Participants performed a free evocation task for the term "university" and responded to a scale of personal involvement in its three dimensions: proximity, appreciation and perceived possibility of action in relation to the object. Once the data were processed by the IRAMUTEQ software, the prototypical analysis showed that the cognemsfuture and study appeared as likely central elements shared by the subgroups. In the analysis of the personal involvement scale, with the t-Student test, a significant difference was found in relation to the valuation of the object in the comparison of the subgroups. In Study 2, three centrality tests, namely Basic Cognitive Schemas (SCB), Mise en Cause (MEC) and Choix par bloc (CPB) were applied, aiming at a certainty as to the central or peripheral status of the representational elements identified in the Study 1. This stage had the participation of 234 students of 3rd year of high school, 117 of private school and 117 of public school. For the subgroup of private school, the centrality of the cognems responsibility and study was confirmed in the SCB and MEC; for the subgroup of the public school, the centrality of study was confirmed in the SCB and MEC; and the cognemdedication was considered central by the MEC and CPB tests. Study 3, meanwhile, involved a questionnaire for the survey of indicators of cultural, economic, and social capital, and expectations for the future with the 160 participants of Study 1. The open questions went through a content analysis and questions aiming at a dichotomization to compose the profile of the participants according to the volume of capital, leading to a new analysis of the scale of personal involvement. The results showed differences in students' social thinking about their future expectations and, in comparing the scale between the participants by capital profile (high and low), a significant difference was observed among students with high cultural capital as regards valuation of the object, as well as high economic capital. The social capital generated a difference of proximity to the university. The results indicate that the personal involvement factor can explain differences between the social representations of distinct groups by the differences in the levels of implication of their members