Representações sociais do corpo envelhecido: Dimensões simbólicas e representacionais para pessoas idosas

Abstract

The transformations in human societies have promoted curiosities about the uses, conceptions, and representations of bodies and the phenomenon of aging, given the distinct characteristics of social, cultural, demographic, and political organization throughout history. This master's dissertation anchors dialogues about the body and aging from the social representations elaborated by elderly people, in order to access the phenomenon as a human dimension and psychosocial knowledge, that is, a way to access and understand the theories of common sense and its resonances in social realities about the experience of aging. Twenty-seven people participated in this study, the vast majority being female (n = 20; 74.1%), aged between 61 and 83 years (M = 68.81; SD = 5.83) and with approximately 3 children (M = 2.48; SD = 1.71). The participants are members of a quali-quantitative research, through the use of a sociodemographic questionnaire, semi-structured interview and Free Association of Words Technique (FWA), and answered questions about the aging body and the experience of aging. The different analytical bodies were treated and results were generated from term frequency analysis (word cloud), Cluster analysis technique (CHD Descending Hierarchical Classification) and similarity analysis (co-occurrence analysis between words). With the changes or transformations of the body over the years, especially taking into account the human aging, it is observed distinct representational notes, also reelaborated by political, socioeconomic and the period in which we live, such as modern and capitalist idealizations of the body, imposed on people as an ideal model to be achieved. In this way, by being inside this social dynamic, they are bodies and subjects negatively affected and with compromises in the social experience. The results indicated, through the prominence of evocations of psychosocial nature, that the body in the aging process is not limited to the physical structure or biological functioning, because the body is about life, it exposes stories and social places. In general, the results exposed throughout this study showed that the understanding about the aging body goes through biopsychosocial aspects, while the content about the social representations of the aging body brings together health psychology, social psychology and other areas of human and sociopolitical knowledge.