As representações sociais sobre AIDS para jovens universitários de Belo Horizonte - MG

Abstract

The emergence of aids completes thirty years in 2010's. The epidemic continues to be broadly studied for its peculiar social history. Initially, it was named the "gay pest" and associated to marginalized groups. Since then, NGOs and other social actors have waged struggles against prejudice and stigmatization. During these three decades, the affected people were distributed according to processes of impoverishment, and feminization of the disease, as well as a process of the disease to attack a younger public. The last one, in particular, has shown that a sexually active youth has been achieved increasingly. Among young people with higher education, it has been observed an increase of contagion. It reveals that the all the years of study and access to material resources have not guaranteed adherence to prevention practices in this segment of the population. In this context, it is important to investigate how these young people have thought and acted in relation to aids. The Theory of Social Representations, which has proved a prolific field for the study of the epidemic since its inception, was used in this investigation. It is known that the social representations are practical theories constructed in a social consensus to make sense of the everyday world. Therefore, they are closely related to behaviors, guiding and justifying them. Thereby, this study sought to identify the social representations of aids among university students of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais - UFMG, as well as the network of meanings, practices and knowledge that are involved. With this objective it has been interviewed, using semi-structured questionnaires, 506 university students, with 251 women and 255 men, aged between 18 and 25 years. Data were subjected to Analysis of Evocations and Content Analysis, and subsequently treated with some descriptive statistical techniques. Representations of aids for students, presented according to the same sex, reveal some more historically rooted elements of the disease, as well as others who approach the realization that it has become more of a chronic disease. Knowledge of respondents about the ways of transmission and prevention reveals that they know how to protect themselves, even if they don´t use condoms with trusted sexual partners. Few underwent HIV testing. This reveals that the group considers itself unlikely to be vulnerable to contamination. An understanding of the social representations of the youth about aids aims to clarify social mechanisms that give meaning to the illness. These mechanisms, on the other hand, affect the sexual practice of the subjects studied. This research, thus, can make available relevant information for proposing interventions and campaigns directed at this group.