When my tutors asked me to carry out research based on the social representation concept, I never imagined that I would mark my steps in terms of how to see reality.
At that time the work was nothing more than my master's thesis and I intended to study the social representation of epilepsy possessed by a group of primary school teachers. Gradually I was delving into the interesting world of why individuals act in one way or another in every situation that occurs to them in their daily lives..
Establishing the antecedents of the origin of social representations constitutes an arduous task considering that there are no explicit references by its creator, Serge Moscovici, and only later reflections by scholars of the subject..
The emergence of this theory dates from 1961 in Paris. After several years of studies, Moscovici presented for the first time in his doctoral thesis entitled Psychoanalysis, its image and its audience, the notion of social representation. The study dealt with the way in which French society viewed Psychoanalysis, through the analysis of the press and interviews with different social groups.
Over the years the concept has evolved, without losing its essence. In this way they can be defined as: cognitive systems in which it is possible to recognize the presence of stereotypes, opinions, beliefs, values Y rules who tend to have a positive or negative attitude orientation.
They are constituted, in turn, as code systems, classificatory logics, interpretive principles and practice guidelines, that define the call collective consciousness, which is governed with normative force as long as institute limits and the possibilities of the way women and men act in the world. In other words, it could be considered as the theory that people and groups obtain a reading of reality and also take a certain position in relation to it..
This category, which comes from sociology but which social psychology has registered, stands as a viable alternative for the investigation of any phenomenon that occurs in society. The methods for identifying the social representation of a given object vary according to the researcher's consideration. To mention a few we can find the word free association, interview, questionnaires to determine knowledge and attitudes about the object, He drew, focus groups, etc.
In some way the concept is related to Freud's work when in his Psychology of the masses and analysis of the Self, takes us into the subject of the soul or collective conscience by exposing the words of Gustavo Le Bon:
"The most unique of the phenomena presented by a psychological mass, is the following: whatever the individuals that compose it and no matter how diverse or similar their type of life, their occupations, their character or their intelligence may be, the simple fact to find themselves transformed into a multitude endows them with a kind of collective soul. This soul makes them feel, think and act in a way that is completely different from how each of them would feel, think and act in isolation. "
Our life is permeated by the direct and indirect impact of the society and culture in which we are immersed. It is the society that dictates norms and regulates the beliefs and opinions that must be had of an object. It is society that guides our practices most of the time and who also limits them.
According to Freud, the psychological mass that makes up that society is transformed into a provisional being and the ideas or attitudes that individuals have within that mass emerge more easily than outside it. A social representation is constituted and becomes operative when it results from the need for a community to make the strange familiar and integrate it, transferring the contents of a science or of a set of ideas to reality..
Moscovici has said it, we live in the age of representation. The people and groups in which they are inserted continually create representations that reconstruct common sense, in other words, the forms of knowledge that give rise to the meanings and images with which we act and communicate in society.
Research on social representations has proven to be effective in investigating phenomena that occur between the person and society. It also offers a wide range of possibilities to the researcher. Latent proof of this is given in the interdisciplinarity of the concept, capable of being applied in any field of study, providing effective results.
The notion of social representation has an open nature that allows the integration of individual subjective experiences and systems of social interaction. Studying them depends both on the processes of production and transformation of common knowledge regarding different social objects, as well as on the cognitive systems that contain the rendering fields.
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