THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS

ABSTRACT This manuscript is aimed at discussing the plural nature of the main conceptual, theoretical and methodological features of the social representations in their various manifestations. As a base to discuss the topics, we used the main texts that amalgamated the vision of the main researchers of psychology, sociology and nursing. According to Moscovici, social representations correspond to acts of thoughts in which subjects relate to the object, and that object through some process is replaced by symbols, turning it into a representation in the subject's mind. This process involves different mechanisms of contextualization, processing, construction and interpretation by sociocultural and linguistic aspects. In the transdisciplinary perspective, social representations emerge as a multidimensional field that permits questioning the nature of knowledge and the relationship individual-society, implanted in the main post-modern epistemological currents.