O olhar do idoso sobre a finitude: um estudo sobre as representaÃÃes sociais da morte em idosos de uma cidade do sertÃo pernambucano

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

This research reflexively describes the representation that elderly people living in the rural area of Pernambuco State have about death and its implication onto their lives. Herein, we consider elderly people those who are 60 years old or above in accordance with National Policy for Elderly People (PolÃtica Nacional dos Ãdosos â PNI). The Social Representation Theory is here used as a theoretical-methodological support to the analyses and discussion of the data. The justification to study the meaning of death, as well as old age lies on the fact that both themes are considered taboos within our society, and therefore silenced. The reason why data were collected hinterland in the State is due to the little visibility of this region in academic researches. Besides that, presumably values and religiosity of country people, differently from the ones of urban people, greatly affects their concepts about death. For the present research 100 elderly people of both sexes from CarnaÃba city were selected. In this city the researcher counted on institutional support to do her work. The data collecting was performed by means of a semi-structured interview presenting issues related to the context of the subjetcsâ lives and questions about death. The data were analyzed by using ALCESTE itware, which analyses the corpus of the interview providing results that favor both qualitative and quantitative analyses. With this analysis, five classes divided into two axes were obtained. In the first axis the category referring to the individualsâ daily life activities context was found. The second axis was subdivided into three categories: health / treatment problems; death (concept); and death (its attributes / feelings). It was possible to verify that talking about death causes discomfort among the individuals researched. Besides, the theme is associated by them to pejorative meanings, such as betrayal. It is worth highlighting that the men (23), despite their reduced number in comparison with the women (77), stood out as the predominant class to talk about death (its attributes / feeling); whereas the women represented typical subjets that reported daily activities. The great majority of the elderly people pointed out that they are the ones who get sick and die the most, thus associating old age to death. The outcome brings about varieties of interpretations on how elderly people deals with death, and this in its turn being connected to old age, which is full of pejorative meaning

ASSUNTO(S)

morte social representation idoso alceste representaÃÃo social psicologia elderly people alceste death

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