Representações sociais de homens e mulheres de Coari sobre qualidade de vida

Abstract

The term quality of life has been widely used in the discourse of professionals and health managers. In Brazil, although the health reform movement and the various attempts to improve primary health care, there is still a gap between theory and practice. Key aspects such as the recognition of personal autonomy and empowerment, which enables the change of attitude of the people, making them active agents of their health, are still little used services. When it comes to research related to health promotion generally focus is directed at females, excluding men from the actions and decisions that interfere with their own life, family and community. Studies on how men and Amazonian women, represent, recognize and report health, are still scarce. In this light, this study aims to identify the social representations of men and women from Coari-AM on quality of life and compare the social representations of men and women. The study, a descriptive exploratory qualitative and quantitative, based on the theory of social representations of Serge Moscovici, in the city of Coari / AM, had the data collection from April to May 2009, with 100 subjects, 50 men and 50 women, having been used multi-method, such as application of WHOQOL-breef the Test of Free Association of Words (TALP) and technique of photography. The data from the WHOQOL-breef were organized in the Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and processed using the software SPSS 16.0, of the TALP entered and organized into a database in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and presented in absolute numbers and percentages and the photography from the method of image interpretation, based on Image Watching approach developed by Ott (1997) in three stages: describing, analyzing and interpreting. The results of the WHOQOL-breef demonstrated the Global Quality of Life and General Health Status and are presented individually in Tables 1 and 2. Table 3 to 34, there are the questions, numbers 3 to 26 of the WHOQOL-breef, with their consolidated the four areas that were analyzed in the fields: physical, psychological, social relationships and environment, it was observed that when performing comparing the mean scores between men and women there was no statistically significant differences in any of the fields. For the results of TALP elements of representations of men and women indicate the likelihood of the core in both groups. In the categories of photographs taken, we identified that the social representations of quality of life are also built by men and women with regard to family, housing and feeding. For the TALP 2, there is representation of quality of life for both groups, with objects / elements related to family, housing, employment and nutrition. We conclude that the social representations of men and women of Coari-AM, constructed from the common sense of the subjects are related to the desires, the needs of survival, gregarious and cultural needs.