Representations and antinomies: rural and city social objects in a Brazilian peasant community

Span J Psychol. 2013:16:E70. doi: 10.1017/sjp.2013.17.

Abstract

The present work is part of a series of studies that primarily focus on social representations of rural and city objects in the process of constructing a social identity of the countryside. Using social representation theory, this study aimed to investigate the representational field linked to the rural and city objects for the members of a peasant community. A total of 200 members of a Brazilian rural community from four generational groups, of both sexes and aged between 7 and 81 years, participated in this study. We conducted individual interviews with semi-structured scripts. The data corpora, processed using EVOC software, consisted of free associations of the rural and city inductor terms. In constitutive terms, the results allow for the identification of antinomies between the objects discussed; in functional terms, they indicate that the process of constructing social identity is based on the symbolic field, which acts as a reference system for the preparation of the rural identity shared by the participants.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Aged
  • Aged, 80 and over
  • Association*
  • Brazil / ethnology
  • Child
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Middle Aged
  • Psychological Theory
  • Qualitative Research
  • Rural Population*
  • Social Identification*
  • Young Adult