Representações sociais da aids: estudo com pessoas vivendo com HIV atendidas em unidades da rede de atenção primária em saúde do município do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the social representations of AIDS of people living with HIV treated at three municipal health centers in Rio de Janeiro, and one of its specific objectives is to compare the differences and similarities between the RS of AIDS in the groups assisted in the three health centers. Cheers. It is a descriptive study, with a qualitative approach, supported by the structural approach of the Theory of Social Representations. 180 people living with HIV participated. The scenarios were three Municipal Health Centers in the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro. A questionnaire was used to characterize the participants to collect sociodemographic and clinical data, in addition to applying the technique of free evocation of words to the term inducer aids. Sociodemographic data were organized in an Excel software spreadsheet. The evocations analysis was performed with the EVOC software with the construction of a four-house chart. In the analysis of the general group, in the possible central core of the representation, the elements disease-normal, fear, bad, normal-life and death were defined.The terms fear, death and bad suggest a central core made up of negative elements, defining AIDS as a normal disease that enables normal life, but generates fear, proximity to death and is therefore bad. The probable NC is formed by normative and functional elements. Thus, even in the upper left quadrant of the presented table, the elements normal-disease and normal-life can be classified as functional. The evocations of fear and bad and death are normative, considering the history of the group, that is, the initial representations of AIDS and the ideological connotation associated with AIDS to a specific group. In the comparison of the three central quadrants, the word disease-normal stands out as a common element to the central nuclei of the three representations, therefore consensual to the three subgroups. The maximum tree points to disease-normal lexicons and prejudice as an indication of centrality. It is concluded that there is a process of change being operated, with the consolidation of the possibility of living with the disease, through elements that characterize the adaptation to the evolution of the new context of the syndrome, together with the maintenance of archaic elements incorporated into the first representations of AIDS . It can be observed in a general way a structural organization that points to this process: the inclusion of the terms disease-normal and life-normal in the central nucleus, and the displacement of the term prejudice towards centrality, but still as a floating element between the central nucleus and first periphery.