Theory and Method of Social Representations

TLDR

The paper reviews social representation theory, defines key concepts, and compares it to attitudes, schemata, and social cognition theories. Six empirical studies—covering gender ontogenesis, the Brazilian public sphere, British television madness, Swiss androgyny images, post‑communist individualism, and metaphorical conception—use ethnography, interviews, focus groups, media content analysis, word‑association statistics, questionnaires, and experiments. These studies collectively illustrate how social representation theory explains the formation and influence of social identities and cultural meanings.

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of social representation theory, definitions of the key terms and of the social processes leading to a representation and to social identity. Six empirical studies are presented and details of their methods and findings are given to illustrate this social psychological approach. These studies are about the ontogenesis of gender, the public sphere in Brazil, madness on British television, images of androgyny in Switzerland, individualism and democracy in post‐communist Europe and metaphorical thinking about conception. The methods are ethnography, interviews, focus‐groups, content analysis of media, statistical analysis of word associations, questionnaires and experiments. Finally, social representation theory is compared to theories of attitudes, schemata and social cognition.