Identificação e construção do conceito de qualidade de vida a partir do acesso e uso da informação por mulheres em privação de liberdade

Abstract

Research conducted in the female wing of the João Chaves Penal Complex in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, with inmates who serve sentences in a closed conditions. It emphasizes the need for studies that significantly discuss the access to and use of information in these institutions, evidencing the quality of life as a interconnected factor to information, mainly by the social character and changes of paradigms in the present time. It questions how women in the context of liberty deprivation understand and construct the concept of quality of life from the need of, access to and use of information. The research has as general objective to analyze what information the internal CPJC need and access for this purpose, and as operational objectives: to identify what they consider quality of life; characterize their need for information required and accessed; specify CPJC's possibilities of offering activities and information that lead to an improvement in the quality of life. Methodologically, it consists of an exploratory research, with a qualitative approach, of the case study type, instrumented by the non-systematic participant observation and the application of semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted with 36 women who accepted to participate in research after contact with CPJC manager. The intertwining of concepts from the theory studied with the reality of the distressed culminates in very complex and contradictory statments between them, especially in the presence of the penitentiary agent. However, the relevance of information to the improvement of the quality of life is demonstrated, especially in environments where information has difficulty entering. There are actions by CPJC to provide access to information in different aspects. Thus, women deprived of their freedom do not have exactly what they want in terms of quality of life but they know what they want and express it in the sense of reaching them, including perceiving differences offered to men even by their family members.