O HIV/AIDS e a pessoa que vive com HIV/AIDS: um estudo de representações sociais com diferentes grupos religiosos

Abstract

The present study has as its objective the social representation of HIV/Aids and people living with HIV/Aids (PLWHA) in different religious groups. Its general objective is to analyze the social representations of HIV/Aids and PLWHA in different religious segments. This is a descriptive and exploratory study with a mixed approach, supported by the theory of social representations in its structural and procedural approaches, being developed in two stages. The first included 521 participants belonging to the 5 main Brazilian religious segments according to IBGE (Catholics, Evangelicals, Kardecist Spiritists, Umbanda and Candomblecists). To access participants, the Snowball technique was used, due to the global scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first phase of collection used the TALP technique with the inducing term HIV/Aids and PLWHA. The second included an interview about HIV/Aids and PLWHA, with 25 users with the same profile. Participant characterization questionnaires were also administered after an analysis of the main variables. In data analysis, the prototype was used with the support of the software Interface de R pour les Analyzes Multidimensionnelles (Iramuteq) as well as similarity by co-occurrence for free evocations. For the content of the interviews, lexical analysis was carried out using the same software. The structure of the representation of HIV/AIDS presented the cognems disease, death, prejudice, fear and viruses as candidates for centrality, at the same time that for the analysis of the inducing term PLWHA the terms treatment, normal, fight and sick. In the procedural analysis, 4 classes emerged. Class 01: The spiritual and religious vision of HIV/Aids and PLWHA for religious people from different segments, Class 2: The memory of HIV/Aids and the person living with the virus and their social representations for the religious group, Class 3 : The normality of daily life after diagnosis according to religious communities and Class 4: The importance of prevention in the fight against HIV in line with religious groups. By carrying out a cross-sectional analysis of the empirical data, it is possible to suggest a change in the representation of HIV in the last 40 years, previously guided by religious and behavioral dogmas, currently dealing with the health-disease process specific to the syndrome.