Student Number : 0106135V -
MA research report -
School of Human and Communitiy Development -
Faculty of Humanities / The mass media persistently thrusts the awareness of risk of HIV/AIDS into our lives.
The question is: how do people respond to this increased awareness and how do
people cope with living in what has been termed ‘the risk society’? This can only be
investigated within a given social and cultural context, in order to examine how
individuals make sense of a perceived imminent crisis. This research has highlighted
the prominent phenomenon of a widespread sense of personal invulnerability when
faced with risk: the ‘not me’ dynamic in response to the negative Social
Representations that surround this disease. Social representations Theory is a useful
psychological framework as it approaches the study of perceptions of HIV risk by
highlighting the emotional factors which are key to the human responses of risk while
at the same time concentrating on the role of cognitive processing in the development
of representations of social phenomena. The results from the HIV Knowledge,
Perceptions & Practices questionnaire survey in this cross-sectional study with 200
Johannesburg university students indicate that while the large majority of the
participants know a great deal about HIV, this knowledge is highly impacted upon by
the Social Representations that exist around this virus. It is believed that the Social
Representations surrounding HIV (death, pollution, the evil perpetrator etc.) can act
as a barrier between intellectual knowledge of HIV and the related behaviour to
reduce the risk of infection by distorting one’s perception of susceptibility of
infection through the process of ‘othering’.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/2119 |
| Date | 26 February 2007 |
| Creators | Howard, Lynlee |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 572943 bytes, application/pdf, application/pdf |
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