SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS IN HEALTH: SUMMON OF INDIVIDUAL PROPERTIES OR EMERGING PROPERTIES?

Abstract

The article resurrects some contributions from sociology toward social factors of the representations in health as well as some contributions from philosophy and the history of science, especially the theory of emerging properties from Bergandi (1981), which is not do with the old argument between the representations of the natural world and the social world but is about the levels of complexity between them. At the center of the debate is the question: social representations are seen as the sum of individuals perceptions or as emerging attributes? One of the great contributions studies concerning representations was the insistence that thought is a socially shared activity, that is, the social representations are sustained within a wider discussion that forms not only individual thought, but also influences how people imagine they should think, talk and do. In this sense, to use individual´s narrative as just account, as if they represent what people really think, and how they behave, does not allow us to identify, the gaps between perceptions and behaviour. For this reason, to analyses how it´s being said is as important as understanding "what is said".